Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture 9780812205183

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Part I. France’s Colonial Relation to the Ancient World
Chapter 1. The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle
Chapter 2. The Return of the Submerged Story About France’s Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation
Part II. France’s Colonial Relation to the New World
Chapter 3. Relating the New World Back to France
Chapter 4. France’s Colonial History
Part III Weaving the Two Colonial Stories Together
Chapter 5. Interweaving the Nation’s Colonial and Cultural Discourses
Chapter 6. Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?
Chapter 7. Imitation and the “Classical” Path
Chapter 8. Using the Sauvage as a Lever to Decolonize France from the Ancients
Conclusion: The Legacy of the Quarrel
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Colonizer or Colonized

C ol on i z e r oR

C ol on i z e d The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

Sar a E. Melzer

universit y of pen n sylvania press phil adel ph ia

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Melzer, Sara E. Colonizer or colonized : the hidden stories of early modern French culture / Sara E. Melzer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4363-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. France—Civilization—History. 2. France—Civilization— Philosophy. 3. France—Civilization—Classical influences. 4. France— Colonies—America. DC33.4 .M44 2012 325.3'44097 2011030912

In memory of my parents, Mildred Mahlin Melzer and Lester Melzer

contents

Introduction 

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Part I. FRANCE’S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE ANCIENT WORLD 

Chapter 1. The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle: The Memory Wars over “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

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Chapter 2. The Return of the Submerged Story About France's Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation

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Part II. FRANCE’S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE NEW WORLD 

Chapter 3. Relating the New World Back to France: The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage

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Chapter 4. France’s Colonial History: From Sauvages into Civilized, French Catholics

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Part III. WEAVING THE TWO COLONIAL STORIES TOGETHER: ESCAPING BARBARISM 

Chapter 5. Interweaving the Nation’s Colonial and Cultural Discourses

125

Chapter 6. Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?

136

Chapter 7. Imitation and the “Classical” Path

173

Chapter 8. Using the Sauvage as a Lever to Decolonize France from the Ancients

199

Conclusion. The Legacy of the Quarrel: The Colonial Fracture

221

Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

231 283 307 319

Introduction

There has never been a document of culture that was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism. —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

“Our Ancestors the Gauls” Once upon a time, long before the birth of France, barbarians inhabited its land. These nomadic tribes, dwelling in forests and caves, were known as the Gauls. They dined on human flesh, or so Diodorus, the Greek historian of the first century b.c., recounted.1 Then they washed down their feasts with wine or a drink they invented made out of barley, now known as beer.2 Lacking any moderation, they became prey to their drunken cravings, and were driven to a state of near madness. But in their more sober moments, they aspired to some order and cleanliness: “They consistently use urine to bathe the body and wash their teeth with it,” Diodorus observed, “thinking that in this practice is constituted the care and healing of the body.”3 According to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman reports4 about the Gauls, their customs were above all marked by barbaric cruelty. Strabo said of the most northern tribes: “When they depart from battle they hang the heads of their enemies from the necks of their horses, and when they have brought them home, nail the spectacle to the entrances of their homes.”5 Such barbarism dominated all their practices. Their priests, the Druids, conducted human sacrifice and engaged in divination by striking a human being “in the back with a sabre, and from his death-struggle they divine[d]” truth.6 Cicero deemed this reported custom “monstrous and barbarous.”7 In battle, the Gauls were known to show up naked.8 While this practice might suggest a self-confident bravery, Diodorus saw it as a foolishness that went hand in hand with cowardice, for they would also flee the battlefield at the strangest moments. Livy viewed the Gauls as 1

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unstable in war, commenting that their “habitual practice” was to begin with a “furious attack,” but then their “physical strength melted away; in their first efforts they were more than men, in the end they were weaker than women.”9 Diodorus deemed their linguistic practices equally monstrous. “The Gauls are terrifying in aspect and their voices are deep and altogether harsh; when they meet together they converse with a few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another; and they like to talk in superlatives, to the end that they may extol themselves and depreciate all the other men. They are also boasters and threateners and are fond of pompous language, and yet they have sharp wits and are not without cleverness at learning.”10 As for their sexual practices, Diodorus reported that homosexuality was rampant. Many men did not sleep with their wives and “had very little to do with them” because they would “rage with lust” and “tumble with a catamite on each side.”11 Such was the image of the Gauls that the Hellenistic Greek and Roman historiographers bequeathed to posterity. The Gauls are central to France’s dominant cultural narrative about itself. This narrative enshrines them as the nation’s ancestors of choice, elevating them to such lofty heights that all French school children were once made to recite proudly the phrase “our ancestors the Gauls” in their history lessons. Hence, the unflattering portrait that I have just highlighted might seem jarring and unfamiliar to most of France’s present-day inhabitants. My description refers to an earlier period in the Gauls’ history when they were colonized by the Greeks and then by the Romans. France’s dominant cultural narrative has excluded this past by pushing it into the shadows of a “prehistory.” France’s official story thus began with the Gauls at a later point in their history, after they had been cleaned up and made presentable by the Romans who had civilized them. I open with the little-known Greco-Roman portrayal of France’s ancestors as barbaric because it lays the groundwork for the first of two interrelated colonial stories that this book tells. This first story takes us back to the nation’s pre-history and recalls that the Gauls were once a colonized people, with the Greeks and Romans as their colonizers. I do not mean to imply that this fact was unknown; rather, it was simply muted by an alternative version that downplayed the significance of this earlier colonial relationship. This earlier past will reveal that the French elite had a much darker and conflicted connection to the Ancient World than its literary history has acknowledged.

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This book’s second story is about France’s colonial relationship to the New World. Here, the French were the colonizers seeking to civilize the New World “barbarians.” (I will henceforth use the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” without quotation marks, although I do not mean to imply that the Amerindians were in fact barbaric or sauvage. See chapter 3 for a discussion of my reasons for using these problematic terms and for preferring the French word sauvage over its English counterpart.) Echoing the GrecoRoman accounts of the Gauls, the French represented the Amerindians as barbarians, repeating a similar profile of otherness. The French colonizing strategy in the New World borrowed the Roman colonizing strategy toward the Gauls. In sum, these two stories mirrored each other. In the first, the Gauls/French were the colonized other, who were then civilized by the Romans. In the second, France became the colonizer, assuming the same role as the Greco-Romans before them by civilizing the New World inhabitants. By creating a “New France” in the Americas, France would become the “New Rome.” After describing these two different colonial relationships, I weave them together to show how they shaped the French elite’s cultural self-understanding. The dominant paradigm for early modern French culture has severed colonization from its cultural discourse about itself, as if it belonged on a different planet. I propose to show, however, that culture and colonization were always conjoined, so interdependent that each enabled and shaped the other. The Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns constitutes the primary locus where the nation’s colonial and cultural discourses merged. (I understand the Quarrel in its broadest sense, extending from the late fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, as the next chapter will discuss.) The Quarrel’s literary and cultural debates did not exist in a vacuum. They were connected to the nation’s colonial discourse of the relations de voyage, which were wildly popular travel reports about the French encounter with the Amerindians of the New World (and with peoples of other lands). The relations framed the nation’s colonization of the New World as a mirror of its relation to the Ancient World. In so doing, France’s colonial discourse pumped new life into the emerging memories of the nation’s distant past as Gauls, establishing parallels between the two stories. This book, then, seeks to show how early modern France carved out its emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, emphasizing the colonial/cultural dynamics that have marked both relationships.

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France’s First Colonial Story: The Nation’s Relation to Ancient Rome The first colonial story that this book unearths can meaningfully qualify as “postcolonial.” This term derives from recent scholarship on formerly colonized, so-called third world nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, especially in their twentieth-century struggles for independence and dignity. Their self-understanding becomes embroiled in a mix of pride and shame visà-vis their former colonizers. This concept, however, has an application much broader than most theorists have realized. Since colonialism is as old as recorded history, it stands to reason that its twin concept of a postcolonial phase would be of equally ancient origin. The concept refers not merely to a political condition of independence after the colonial period but also and especially to a cultural condition in which the nation’s self-understanding is anchored in the experience of a prior historical period of direct colonial rule.12 Because the term “postcolonial” was coined in a modern context, it may seem recklessly anachronistic to apply it to early modern France. Many literary critics bristle at any use of anachronistic concepts, consigning them to the realm of bad scholarship and sloppy thinking. However, Yves Citton in Lire, interpréter, actualiser, has powerfully defended the anachronistic by showing how contemporary categories of thought, if applied with careful attention to relevant historical specificity, can create a meaningful dialogue between past and present.13 In what he calls “une lecture actualisante,” Citton urges that the past be reframed to make it more relevant and meaningful for the present. Much of that past is inaccessible except through a more modern lens since many phenomena can only be understood retrospectively. Anachronisms provide a retrospective lens, enabling us to see more clearly what was less evident at any earlier time. A number of medievalists began to use postcolonial theory in 2000 to bring out important dimensions of the Middle Ages which have otherwise been obscured.14 They convincingly demonstrate that postcolonial theory is not a one-size-fits-all methodology, but can be adapted to fit earlier times and places. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor of the foundational Postcolonial Middle Ages, emphasized that the fit will never be exact and that this lack of fit was a virtue. It forces scholars to reflect more upon the historical specificity of the relevant cultural contexts for both modern and pre-modern eras. While pre-modern scholars have much to learn from postcolonial theory, postcolonial theorists also have much to learn from pre-modern scholarship about the

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history that informs their own era and about the nature of the theory itself. The postcolonial, then, is a capacious, heterogeneous mode of thought that can be meaningfully configured to illuminate the particularities of different historical moments. Since this book is concerned with early modern France, I interpret the postcolonial very differently than do both medieval and modern scholars. I ground my understanding of this concept in the historical and cultural circumstances most relevant for the early modern context. Historically, that context is the period when both the Greeks and the Romans literally colonized the Gauls. The Romans, of course, played a much more significant role because they were the more recent colonizers and their legacy was also more long lasting. Their law, language, and culture still dominated the world of early modern France. The Romans had colonized the Gauls beginning in 121 b.c., when they conquered and annexed the southern reaches of Gaul, founding their first colonia at Narbo Marius (Narbonne) in 118 b.c. Julius Caesar then enlarged the Roman stronghold in Gaul, through a military conquest during the Gallic Wars of 58–51 b.c., bombarding the Gauls with eight successive campaigns. Caesar’s conquest culminated in Vercingetorix’s defeat in 52 b.c. Later, Augustus used a softer touch to bring the Gauls under the empire’s hegemony. He “civilized” these barbaric tribes, transforming them from Gauls into Romans. At this point, the story gets murky. How deep and how permanent was this transformation? Did the Gauls ever achieve independence? According to historians of today, the Gauls never really achieved independence because they became Latin-speaking peoples, or Gallo-Romans.15 However, France’s early modern writers such as François Hotman, Honoré d’Urfé, and Scipion Dupleix presented the Franks as having liberated the Gauls from the Romans. This confusion about the Gauls’ independence is at the heart of the postcolonial dilemma I will be exploring. This literal, historical context is not sufficient to qualify as postcolonial. The mere fact that the French once experienced colonial rule would not automatically mean they suffered from postcolonial trauma. The historical fact of colonization needs to be combined with cultural elements. The decisive factor in determining the “postcolonial” is whether influential groups of intellectuals, writers, and politicians articulated the relationship as problematic in ways that significantly shaped their collective self-understanding. At first glance, it would seem ludicrous to suggest that France’s colonial past could have plagued its early modern writers given that the Ancient Greeks and Romans had been dead and gone for more than a thousand years. Since these colonizers were not

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standing over France’s writers, sword in hand or words at the ready, (brow) beating them into submission, they could hardly qualify as a menace. By any objective measure, this colonial past would seem but a flicker of a memory, buried in the catacombs of time, powerless to haunt the writers’ present consciousness. And yet, the textual evidence reveals that the remnants of this past were hauntingly alive. I am not suggesting that this colonial history was an actual memory lingering in the French consciousness for an entire millennium. On the contrary, this history was a recent invention. It was constructed in the late fifteenth century when French intellectuals began to reconfigure their history by claiming the Gauls as their ancestors. Until then, the Gauls had been largely forgotten, since the French did not consider the Gauls part of their own history. Thus, France’s medieval chroniclers breathed not a word about them.16 These chroniclers began French history at a much later date, preferring the Franks as ancestors because they had supposedly descended from the Trojans. A Frankish-Trojan ancestry made the French more direct heirs to the Romans, connecting the nation back to the Holy Roman Empire. This lineage enabled the French monarchy to claim greater legitimacy.17 The Trojan myth of descent had predominated up to the sixteenth century. The Trojan myth paralleled that of Ancient Rome’s legendary founding. In so doing, it forged a kinship between France and Rome by linking their respective cultures, origins, and destinies. According to this myth, France began when Troy was destroyed. Hector’s son, Francus or Francio, escaped and set up a new nation. Eventually he became king of the Franks. This story echoed the Roman founding legend. After Troy’s destruction, Aeneas fled his homeland and lived in exile until he came to Latium, where he founded Rome.18 In short, a Frankish-Trojan lineage was the umbilical cord attaching France to Rome. Some French intellectuals, however, felt strangled by this cord and wanted to break it. Since all roads seemed to lead to Rome, many of France’s cultured elite felt suffocated, suffering from “a sentiment of national inferiority” and wanted to promote a greater “nationalist consciousness,” as literary scholar Claude-Gilbert Dubois phrased it.19 They turned toward the Gauls and claimed them as ancestors to construct a bypass route and circumvent Rome’s enduring influence. Dubois has characterized the French elite’s pursuit of independence as “an enterprise of cultural de-colonization: classical antiquity had invaded everything and sought to bring back everything to it.”20 While Dubois briefly articulated this colonial dynamic, he never developed

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this connection. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, however, more powerfully developed a similar insight, arguing that the struggle for the vernacular was “an act of independence in relation to a power that we today would not hesitate to qualify as colonial.”21 Thus in the late fifteenth century several humanists sought to dethrone both the Trojans and the Romans by going back to the graveyard of history to exhume the Gauls and claim them as ancestors to the French.22 Declaring a Gallic ancestry was, for many, an act of declaring independence from Rome. This new genealogy caught on like wildfire in the sixteenth century, stirring up a veritable “Gallomania,” as Christian Hermann has called it.23 Jean Lemaire de Belges, Guillaume Postel, Guillaume Budé, François Hotman, Etienne Pasquier, François de Belleforest, Guillaume du Bellay, Joachim du Bellay, Robert Céneau, Jean Picard de Toutry, Guillaume Le Rouille, Guillaume des Autelz, Claude Fauchet, Etienne Forcadel, Nicolas Vignier, and many others promoted a Gallic ancestry.24 Clearly, the proposed new origin had hit a powerful nerve. This declaration of independence from Rome impassioned the hearts of many because it resonated with multiple narratives about Rome. As postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe would note centuries later, the power of a colonized past to impact the present depends on how its stories become entangled in a multitude of narratives that “overlay and interpenetrate one another,” and depends less on how long ago this past occurred.25 In sixteenth-century France, the term “Rome” served as a code word for the pope and the Roman Catholic Church.26 Gallican-oriented thinkers such as Etienne Pasquier and Guillaume Postel championed the Gauls in the fight for a “nationalist” French church. Challenging an international Roman Church with a Roman pope at its center, these thinkers preferred a Franco-centered, or Gallocentric, church. Overlaying this meaning was another one, which the religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics triggered, giving a different emotional charge to the word “Rome.” Significantly, many Protestants such as François Hotman were the leaders in proposing the Gauls as ancestors. Their goal was to challenge Papal Rome’s religious authority. Similarly, “Rome” became a code word for those seeking to reduce the Roman influence in law. Followers of the French tradition of law, the mos gallicus, referred back to the Gauls in their pre-Roman times to question the validity of Roman law, especially the tenets that grounded the king’s absolute power. On yet another battlefield, “Rome” stood in for the Italians of the contemporary world, who were threats because they could make a special claim to being the most legitimate heirs of the Roman Empire. Moreover, many French humanists felt dwarfed by Italy’s

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cultural dominance. Since “Rome” and “Roman” often conjured up a range of targets that merged in the minds of those humanists who pitted the Gauls against the Romans, this colonial struggle was entangled in multiple strands of several different battles, all of which were anti-Roman. The anti-Roman strain of France’s cultural narrative belongs to what Michel Foucault has called a “counter-history.” Such a history gets cast into the shadows because it is the “discourse of those who have no glory, or of those who have lost it and now find themselves in darkness and silence.” This side of history has been hidden “not only because it has been neglected, but because it has been carefully, deliberately and wickedly misrepresented.”27 Foucault observed that an anti-Roman sentiment in France surfaced in the sixteenth century, challenging the historians of the Middle Ages who never saw “any difference, discontinuity, or break with Roman history and their own history, the history they were re-counting.”28 Literary scholar Philippe Desan also noted a similar break with Ancient Rome in the sixteenth century, but he characterized it differently, as a “crisis of humanism.” Desan described how French intellectuals increasingly challenged the humanist ideal of a GrecoRoman universalism from the mid-sixteenth century onward. There were almost no new translations of ancient texts toward the end of the sixteenth century, which reflected, according to Desan, the elite’s desire to promote a “nationalism by writing in the vernacular.” These intellectuals rejected Greek and Roman models for not corresponding to their everyday life experiences and thus cultivated a “mode of thought that would correspond more fully to their national and cultural specificity.”29 Desan discerned multiple “axes of crisis” for humanism, which he likened to a golden apple with a beautiful form that nevertheless contained a worm within, eating away and emptying its core. One worm in French humanism was that many French intellectuals embraced a Gallic ancestry to escape the suffocating force of a Greco-Roman universalism. However, to liberate France from Latin and Ancient Rome by planting the Gauls at the root of France’s family tree proved difficult. France’s men of letters did not have any historical documentation to buttress their proposed new lineage and thus had to rely on mythical stories. As a result, the more established myth of a Trojan descent still held sway during much of the sixteenth century.30 The anti-Roman strain reached a decisive moment when Etienne Pasquier published the first few volumes of his monumental six-volume Recherches de la France in 1562. His research played a crucial role in legitimizing the Gauls as ancestors. This jurist and historian devoted almost sixty years to documenting

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France’s Gallic ancestry. The full set of volumes was printed in final form six years after his death in 1615.31 Pasquier’s text commanded such authority and interest that it was reprinted in 1607, 1621, 1633, 1643, and 1665. In documenting this new lineage, however, Pasquier encountered a key problem: the Gauls were barbarians colonized by the Romans. Seemingly illiterate, the Gauls left no writings to record their deeds and tell their own story. To construct their ancestral past, France’s humanists thus made a standard postcolonial move of turning to the texts of their former masters. They tried to use Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny, Livy, Mela, Tacitus, and Suetonius as sources for their anticolonial counter-narrative. But as the portrait with which I began this book indicated, these Greco-Roman writers demeaned the Gauls as barbarians. Pasquier was forced to understand France’s ancestry through the disdainful eyes of the Gauls’ colonizers. Like many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury figures from France’s former colonies, Pasquier faced the dilemma of having to use the distorted lens of the nation’s former colonizers to construct an independent and dignified understanding of its own past. Seeking to transcend the bias of his sources, Pasquier found himself trapped in a dilemma: his own modes of conceiving France’s ancestors—and by extension France itself—were caught inside the language and mental categories of these sources. This trap was a version of what we would now call the “colonial bind.” Understanding the “post” phase of the postcolonial is more complicated, especially in the context of early modern France. The split between direct colonial rule and its aftermath is not anchored in a specific, limited historical moment. There are no clear temporal boundaries, especially since the Gauls never formally decolonized themselves. These ancestors never officially achieved independence; they simply became Romanized, and then the Roman Empire itself disappeared. The “post” in “postcolonial” does not necessarily mean that the effects of colonization were over after the political colonial moment had passed. Decolonization still remains a struggle in the “post”-colonial phase because the dynamics of the original colonial relationship “can be duplicated from within,” as Ania Loomba has observed.32 The real struggle begins after political independence. Many cultural bonds still remain, since they have become part of the hearts and souls of the colonized, who have internalized their former masters’ values. The colonized thus voluntarily repeat the initial colonial dynamic, unwittingly imitating the colonizers’ modes of thought. In so doing, the colonized often engage in a “neocolonization” that makes it hard to separate out colonizer and colonized.33 This situation, where the colonized

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reconstitute a colonial mentality within their own hearts and minds, aptly describes the dilemma of early modern France. As Lorenzo Valla famously wrote centuries earlier in his Elegantiae (1471), the Roman Empire existed “wherever the Roman language was spoken,” and this extended far beyond its original political and religious dominion.34 And far beyond its time. In early modern France, the prestige of the Roman language, law, and civilization ensured that Roman modes of thought not only endured but also shaped the French struggle to escape from those very thought structures. Implausible as it may seem, the nation’s dark and distant colonized past continued to haunt France’s educated elite many centuries after its colonizers had died and the Roman Empire had faded away. The most important evidence for this haunting phenomenon is located in the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, a series of cultural debates about France’s relation to the Ancient World. The term “ancients” is confused because it refers to two different groups: 1) to France’s early modern writers who championed the classical world as the apogee of all worthwhile knowledge, and 2) the Greeks and Romans themselves. I therefore use the term “ancients” with a small a to refer to France’s early modern writers and the term “Ancients” with a capital A to designate the Greeks and Romans, following Terence Cave’s convention.35 The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns continually raised the specter of the nation’s colonized past when many early modern intellectuals returned to the graveyard of history, disinterred the dead bodies of the Ancients, and infused them with new life by writing imagined dialogues with these ghostly figures. Some of these dialogues were explicit, as in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1680) and Dialogues des morts (1683), but most were implicit. When these dead souls returned, however, their apparitions did not always wear a kindly face professing solidarity and support of their “sons.” Nor did they necessarily even claim the French as sons. Rather, these phantom figures often returned with a vengeance, carping at the French for their insufficiency, taunting them with the label “barbarian,” continuing to wage another version of the original battle. The ghosts of this past were threaded in and around the Ancients’ language and logic that France’s intellectuals were imitating. These phantom figures fueled the French elite’s fears about themselves. In short, the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was a massive, enduring colonial battle that took place in the psyche of France’s humanist-educated elite. Struggling to decolonize themselves from the GrecoRomans, both the “ancients” and the “moderns” sought to forge the French nation’s own emerging independent, cultural identity, albeit in different ways.

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But both found Greco-Roman universalism stifling because it dwarfed their own stature. Their revolt was complicated, however, because they also admired the Greeks and Romans and viewed their discourse as that of authority, power, and civilization, thus making independence very difficult. While many intellectuals struggled to decolonize the French mind from the Greco-Romans, many also unwittingly reinstituted the initial colonial relationship, except that they called these bonds “civilization” and greatness.

France’s Second Colonial Story: Creating a New France in the New World Mirroring France’s foundational relationship to the Ancient World was a second colonial story that focused on the New World. This second story began in the sixteenth century when many French explorers sailed across the Atlantic, hoping to establish colonial settlements. But those initial efforts were ill conceived and failed, especially since the nation was hampered by its internal religious wars.36 But nonetheless, many of those travelers, such as Jacques Cartier and Jean de Léry, published important accounts of their voyages, which stirred the reading public’s imagination and created interest in the Americas. In 1598, after Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, the church and, to a lesser extent the state had more energy and resources to expand their spheres of influence outward. They turned in two major directions—toward the Americas and the Levant.37 France’s interest in each was quite different. In the New World, the French sought to establish settlements and hoped to transform this area into an extension of itself as a New France. French travelers projected the image of a New France onto different parts of the Americas, not simply what are now Québec and the Maritime Provinces.38 By contrast, the French were mostly interested in the Levant as a place to establish ports for their commercial activities. This part of the world did not really convey the promise of a New France. The story that I will present of the French encounter with the New World highlights France’s colonial strategy of assimilation. Although the French church and state painted the Amerindians as barbarians, these institutions nevertheless sought to assimilate them and have them form “one people” with the French, to borrow a recurring phrase from the relations de voyage. Official French policy urged the French and the Native Americans to live together, work together, pray together, and be educated together. This policy went so far as to promote intermarriage. To help colonize the New World, Louis XIV’s

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minister Colbert urged that the Native Americans be made capable “of being admitted into the common life of the French,”39 to form “a single people and a single blood.”40 He instructed that dowries be offered to French Indian couples as an incentive to marry and to remain in the French, Catholic community. Intermarriage was an ideal throughout most of the seventeenth century, even though few marriages were actually concluded. This policy began as early as the first decade and lasted almost to the century’s end.41 The relations de voyage reported several stories about intermarriage between the French and the Amerindians. In one striking account, a French colonist named Michel Accault sought to marry a Christianized Native American woman, Aramepinchieue, daughter of the Kaskaskia chief who lived near what is now Peoria, Illinois, in 1694. Although the Frenchman was a tireless suitor, he did not have the fabled Gallic charm that would sweep her off her feet. She rejected his many advances, as she preferred God over what she saw as a debauched Frenchman. Nevertheless, her unchristianized parents were eager for the match, in order to promote trade relations. They pressured her, even resorting to stealing her modest but fine French clothes. Their harassment led to a massive argument in which she shouted at the Frenchman “I hate you” and threatened suicide. Exasperated, she turned for advice to Father Gravier, a Jesuit who had established a mission in the collection of villages at Pimitoui, Illinois.42 He counseled her: “God does not forbid you to marry; neither do I say to you, marry or do not marry. If you consent solely through love for God, and if you believe that by marrying you will win your family to God, the thought is a good one.”43 Yielding to the pressure, Aramepinchieue married her French suitor. But she did so only to please Jesus Christ, thinking that her marriage would benefit the community. Her reasoning proved correct: immediately after her marriage, her father, her mother, and her entire village reportedly converted to Christianity in a grand rally of conversions. It was a reference to this French colonial policy of intermarriage that sowed the seeds for this book. About twelve years ago, I stumbled across a footnote about Colbert’s policy. After reading it, I was so amazed to learn that the French church and state encouraged mixed communities and intermarriage that I had to reread the footnote a few times to make sure I had understood it correctly. How was it possible that I had never even heard of this policy? I then conducted an informal survey of numerous seventeenth-century literary scholars, including historians of France, phoning and e-mailing them in the United States, France, and England. No one else had heard of this policy either. In fact, some of the scholars even doubted its veracity.

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My colleagues and I reasoned that if such a policy had existed, it would have been kept a dark secret, hidden from the awareness of the general French public. Given that such a phenomenon occurred on the far side of the Atlantic, all knowledge of it was probably restricted to those distant shores. After all, it is not uncommon for political regimes to promote policies on foreign soil that would be unacceptable at home. This secrecy might explain why literary scholars were unaware of this history—it would not seem to have had any influence on France’s own culture. I soon discovered, however, that this colonial policy was by no means a secret. Indeed, it was common knowledge to the French reading public of the seventeenth century. While the church and state could easily have pursued this policy under the table, they chose to put it on the table and even make it the centerpiece. They eagerly advertised it as a public-relations campaign to promote their expansionist endeavors, and even brought several Native American men from Brazil to Paris in 1613 to be baptized and married to French women before Louis XIII and all of Paris.44 But besides this dramatic spectacle, the church and state encouraged travelers to the New World to write relations de voyage that described their intimate encounters with the Amerindians. And yet, despite this publicity, it is not completely surprising that neither I nor my colleagues knew of this policy, because it runs directly counter to the paradigm that most literary scholars and cultural historians have constructed for the seventeenth century. Dubbed “classical,” this period is the one moment in French history in which one would least expect to find a policy promoting marriage with sauvages. The master discourse for this socalled classical era has emphasized France’s closing of borders, tightening of ranks, and promoting of greater constraints, exclusivity, and homogeneity in the name of purity and civility. John Rule has observed that the French state at this moment developed an increasingly specialized vocabulary to describe its borders: “limites,” “cordon défensif,” “régions frontières,” “frontières fortifiées,” “les côtes de France,” “portes,” “frontières naturelles.”45 Henry Phillips has shown how the Catholic Reformation sought to tighten boundaries between different forms of space to protect an imagined inside space from a contaminating outside.46 He argues that an increasingly rigid inside/outside divide characterized France’s literary culture and its aesthetic values. Mitchell Greenberg has analyzed French classical theater in terms of an ever-tightening family circle, describing how the literary canon was linked to how individuals constituted themselves as subjects within as closed a system as possible.47 As is well known, when Richelieu founded the French Academy, he restricted

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what could be said in order to “purify” the French language and literature. Its rules for drama reduced the action on stage to one place, one plot, and one day. Philosophically, Descartes’ categories of clear and distinct ideas emerged as rationalized boundaries to order and classify the world, as Foucault has analyzed.48 At court, sartorial codes limited physical movement. The aristocracy became increasingly encumbered with ribbons, lace, and multiple layers of clothing; Louis XIV sported red high-heeled shoes and cascading wigs. The rules governing aristocratic behavior grew exponentially to assure ever more refined levels of civility.49 Given these core values of containment, purity, refinement, and order, it seems inconceivable that the French state and church would have promoted its diametrical opposite. How could these institutions have also engaged in a politics of expansion that blurred the boundaries between self and other? How could they have encouraged intimate relations with sauvages who lived in the woods, dressed in animal skins stitched together with intestinal gut and, some said, ate human flesh? How could the church and the state have welcomed intimate contact with people deemed crude, filthy, and barbaric? The nation’s politics of assimilating sauvages thus seemed implausible, invraisemblable, because it was so contrary to the dominant cultural paradigm. Historians of France’s colonies in the Atlantic world, however, had been illuminating this colonial encounter for well over a century. For these historians, France’s policy was hardly a secret. In fact, it was common knowledge. In 1896, Reuben Gold Thwaites made the Jesuit relations de voyage available in a modern, bilingual edition. Other historians unearthed a trove of archival materials documenting France’s colonial contact with the New World. In more recent decades, historians of the Atlantic world, such as Saliha Belmessous, Allan Greer, Philippe Jacquin, Cornelius Jaenen, Gilles Havard, Cécile Vidal, and Richard White, have produced an impressive mass of research devoted to early modern France’s colonial endeavors.50 And yet this historical research has made only a small dent in the nation’s self-understanding, as Havard and Vidal have acknowledged. Most scholars of France still view colonization largely as peripheral to France’s own cultural identity, which is seen as enclosed within an insular, self-protective bubble. How, then, to understand this resistance to including colonization as central to early modern France’s own story about its culture and history? Clearly, a disciplinary divide separates what is known to most scholars of France as opposed to scholars of its former New World colonies. This split reflects the dilemma of what Clifford Geertz has called “local knowledge,”

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where the most basic knowledge of one discipline may be completely unknown in another.51 The disciplinary divide cuts more deeply than usual in this particular case, since it breaks down along the colonizer/colonized axis. As in any power relationship, the subordinate often has knowledge of the master that the master himself may choose to ignore, as Hegel analyzed in his famous master-slave discussion. In this instance, scholars who focus on the Franco-Amerindian encounter from the perspective of the colonized have a knowledge of the colonizer that is unknown to most of its significant specialists. This colonizer/colonized axis appears to be more important than the literature/history divide, since many cultural historians of France have been almost as unfamiliar with this colonial policy as literary scholars have been. My book seeks to bridge the disciplinary gap. Scholars focused on the colonizer’s side of the divide have been limited by France’s dominant cultural paradigm which has shaped what they know and are not permitted to know. This paradigm is characterized by what I call a cultural poetics of containment. The nation’s colonial politics of expansion are made to seem invraisemblable because it clashes so strongly with the dominant paradigm. Influenced by the classical period’s ideal—not to say fetish—of unity, homogeneity, and purity, this paradigm has been virtually silent about colonization, sealing off the nation’s cultural identity as self-sufficient, allowing no role for its external colonial endeavors. The seal has been so tight that even though numerous Atlantic world historians have already amply documented France’s colonial activities for many decades, this research has barely scratched the surface of the nation’s cultural self-image. It is as if France’s colonial contact with the barbarian other had little importance for its cultural self-understanding. The growing body of research from scholars focused on the colonized side of the divide suggests that colonization was a much more significant phenomenon than France’s cultural paradigm has allowed for. We thus need to reconfigure the nation’s cultural paradigm to account for the more complex dynamics of the culture/colonization nexus. Many literary scholars have already challenged the standard paradigm in many significant ways, but few have opened it up by including colonization within the nation’s own cultural self-understanding. My book thus enlarges the nation’s cultural discourse to show how colonization was always already inside French culture, intimately entwined, since colonization and culture operated in intersecting spheres. Much has changed in the years since I began my research. Early modern French scholars have increasingly explored the nation’s colonial contact with the Americas and other parts of the world.52 But most of these scholars

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examine either France’s justification for colonization or the colonizer’s impact on the colonized. My book reverses the predominant trajectory to ask how colonization shaped the colonizer. How did France’s colonial relation to the New World matter for understanding France and its emerging cultural identity in the early modern era? In asking this question, I join the work of a growing number of scholars, most of whom have explored the problematics of colonization beginning with the eighteenth century, but concentrating mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 53 These scholars have shown how the nation’s imperial projects shaped France as much as they shaped the colonized. Only a few studies have focused on the early modern era, although that number is now growing. Several studies have been exemplary. Bill Marshall’s The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History, reaches back to this earlier period to argue that Frenchness needs to be understood in relation to France’s contact across the Atlantic.54 He challenges the paradigm that treats “France” as totally separate from and antithetical to “America.” Olivia Bloechl’s Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music shows how the music of France and England were affected by their colonial contact with the New World.55 Brian Brazeau’s Writing a New France explores how the travel literature about New France shaped the emerging sense of Frenchness from 1604 to 1632.56 Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal’s Histoire de l’Amérique Française and Richard White’s The Middle Ground trace the reciprocal exchanges that took place between the nations on opposite sides of the Atlantic.57 The important articles of Saliha Belmessous and Guillaume Aubert have examined the implications of this colonial policy for the French concept of race.58 More broadly, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald, shows how the very center of French literary history was always shaped by boundary crossings between the national and other places on the globe. Christopher Miller’s French Atlantic Triangle explores how the nation’s identity was shaped by a triangulated relationship to Africa and the Americas.59 My book is in this vein.

Including the New World Within the Paradigm About Early Modern France To reverse the standard line of argumentation and claim that colonization shaped the colonizer is particularly thorny in France’s case. The evidence for

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such a reverse influence is not obvious because the nation’s canonical literature contains few direct references to the New World.60 This scarcity of references has, I suspect, caused most literary scholars to assume that France’s colonial endeavors were completely disconnected from its internal concerns. By contrast, Spanish literature and British literature overtly reflect their national colonial enterprises. It is thus not surprising that most of the scholarship discussing the impact of the New World on the Old has concentrated on Spain and England, with relatively little analysis of France prior to the eighteenth century.61 Confronted with the paucity of direct references to the Americas in France’s canonical literature, I had to reconceptualize the notion of evidence. What constitutes proof? Following the leads of historians Anthony Pagden and Anthony Grafton, I realized that evidence is not necessarily measured through the number of direct references.62 Nor does it manifest itself through a simple cause-and-effect relationship, since the proof does not always exist on the surface of easily observable, external events.63 Rather, one needs to look for indirect evidence by considering how information about the New World intersected with other events and thought structures in France. Accordingly, I situated the European “discovery” of the New World in relation to another key “discovery” that occurred at roughly the same time— that of the Ancient World. Because the news of the Ancient World was so momentous, it tended to overshadow the news of the New World, which came in its wake. Yet both events need to be viewed as twin phenomena. Although France’s relation to the Ancient World and the New World were separate, many of its intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries repeatedly linked them. They situated both worlds on a single evolutionary continuum from barbarism to civilization. They wove these worlds together through an underlying cultural narrative that assumed all of humanity was on the same upward journey.64 The Ancient Greeks and Romans, having arrived at “civilization” first, graciously held up the torch of enlightenment to illumine the path for the world’s barbarians. Having civilized the French, these Ancients passed their torch to them as their heirs, like a baton in a relay race—or so the French argued. The Ancients entrusted the French with their cultural patrimony, to spearhead the same mission and carry it overseas to the New World. The Romans, more than the Greeks, figured in that story, since they provided the model for France’s colonization of the New World. The members of France’s cultured elite imagined that the Romans named them as their successors, so that both were aligned as fellow colonizers/civilizers, fused as a composite “us” against a barbarian “them.” As Pagden has rightly observed, all

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European colonizers of this period borrowed the Greek and Roman discourses of empire, for “the theoretical roots of the modern European overseas empire reached back into the empires of the Ancient world.” Rome in particular “provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium Romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of Western Europe.”65 France thus defined itself by playing the same role for the barbarians of their own world that the Ancients had played for them. In sum, the Ancients were for the French what the French were to be for the Native American barbarians. This French imperial narrative, however, had a darker side: the barbarian lurked in the shadows of France’s relationship to the Ancient World. While French intellectuals tried to align themselves with the Greeks and Romans as civilized colonizers, they repeatedly found themselves slipping into a position analogous to that of the New World barbarian other, as I will show. When France’s travelers and historians reflected on the Native Americans, they conjured up the memories of their own past when they were “barbaric” Gauls whom the Romans and Greeks had civilized. France, situated in the murky middle ground between barbarism and civilization, occupied an ambiguous position. The French were threatened by barbarism from below, and it was not entirely clear how far they had progressed toward civilization. Where to situate France was a key question at the heart of the nation’s cultural debates. Some intellectuals even feared a regression—they could be pulled back into primitivism. The Native Americans embodied what the French could revert back to if they failed to emulate the Ancients sufficiently, and thus the shadows of these primitive creatures hovered over the debates about the French imitation of the Greeks and Romans. The nation’s cultural narrative occasionally aligned the French with the New World barbarians. The relationship could be reformulated as follows: the French were to the Ancients what the New World barbarians were to the French. In describing France’s colonial relations to both the New World and the Ancient World, I use the term “assimilation,” which is an anachronism. Understood in its specific colonial usage, this term was not coined until the nineteenth century.66 Nevertheless, I use the term for three reasons. First, assimilation is a general term that enables me to connect the seventeenthcentury story back to its foundation in Ancient Rome. The French sought to transform sauvages into French Catholics, just as the Romans had transformed the Gallic barbarians into Romans. France’s model was romanization, the

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Roman version of assimilation.67 Second, the term “assimilation” also enables me to gesture forward to the modern era, emphasizing that the seventeenthcentury policy marked a foundational moment in the history of what would become France’s most enduring stance toward the other. The seventeenth-century transformation of sauvages into French Catholics laid the groundwork for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts in Africa and Asia, and within France itself. As Eugen Weber has described assimilation in his pioneering study, From Peasants into Frenchmen, the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury state pursued an internal colonization of its peasants, viewing them as sauvages who needed to be civilized and integrated into France’s dominant culture.68 Weber observed that this internal colonization of France’s peasantry was connected to the external colonization of Asia and Africa. Many writers likened both forms of otherness to the New World Amerindians. For example, in Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth-century novel Les Paysans, a Parisian traveled to the Burgundy countryside where he was struck by the peasants’ similarity to the New World sauvage. “You don’t need to go to America to see sauvages,” he said. “Here are the Redskins of Fenimore Cooper.”69 Balzac did not make up his connection out of thin air. He was building on the seventeenth-century assimilationist stance that viewed the Amerindians as the prototype of the sauvage. In short, I use the term “assimilation” to position my book within a broader historical sweep: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century state’s discourse of colonization was modeled on that of the seventeenth century, which in turn was modeled on that of the Romans. Third, I use term “assimilation” because no single, good seventeenthcentury alternative exists. France’s writers referred to this phenomenon by a constellation of related terms: “civiliser,” “humaniser,” “éduquer,” “aider,” “convertir,” “franciser,” “coloniser.” The first few terms—“civiliser,” “humaniser,” “éduquer,” and “aider”—are deceptive, as they come from a discourse of politeness that camouflages the fact that colonization is at issue. This rhetoric of politeness has been so effective that to this day many literary scholars of seventeenth-century France, and even some cultural historians, simply pay lip service to colonization and do not recognize it as a central concern. The other alternatives, “convertir,” “franciser,” and “coloniser,” raise the problematic church-state relationship. The term “convertir” is confined to a religious context; “franciser” suggests a political or cultural context, as does “coloniser,” thereby separating the religious from the political. I need, however, a larger, umbrella term to designate the fact that both the church and the state pursued a policy in the New World to transform sauvages into French Catholics. Under

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this umbrella term, I include the church’s primary goal of evangelizing, and the state’s primary goal of colonizing/Frenchifying and civilizing. While these objectives were different, and often conflicted, they also overlapped in many instances. I thus take the term “assimilation” to mean a combination of evangelizing, colonizing, Frenchifying, and civilizing, since each did not constitute an entirely distinct phenomenon. Using such an anachronistic term is, of course, not without its dangers. The first danger is that the nineteenth-century concept of assimilation might cause us to view the seventeenth-century policy retrospectively through the lens of France’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century endeavors in Asia and Africa, which were very different. These later colonial efforts forbade intermarriage, fostered segregated communities, and discouraged most forms of intersocial or intercultural contact. By contrast, the seventeenth-century church and state aggressively promoted the most intimate forms of contact with the Native Americans, including intermarriage. Thus, the danger in looking at this seventeenth-century phenomenon through the frame of its modern, better-known counterpart is that we risk dulling its edge. It is essential to sharpen that edge because it heightens the clash between the nation’s colonial discourse of expansion and its cultural ideals of containment and purity.

Altering the Paradigm of French Literary History This clash suggests that the traditionally accepted cultural paradigm for early modern France must be reconfigured to account for the nation’s colonial politics of expansion. This book challenges the most fundamental and unexplored assumptions of the standard cultural paradigm and proposes a new one in its place. The first assumption is that France defines the nation’s cultural identity only in a dyadic relationship to classical antiquity. The standard labels for French history reflect that relationship. The term “Renaissance” placed the Ancients at the source of France’s rebirth in the sixteenth century. By implication, prior to her “rebirth,” France was in the “Dark Ages,” a label that was once (erroneously) common for the Middle Ages. Scholars frame the seventeenth century as the classical age in France, characterizing this period as a revival of Greek and Roman learning. Quite strikingly, they rarely use the term “neoclassical” as in the case of its English counterpart. Eliminating the “neo” tightens the bond between France and classical antiquity yet further. A second, related assumption of the prevailing paradigm is that France’s

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humanist-educated elite aligned themselves with the Greco-Romans as an “us,” placing themselves in a corresponding position of dominance. This assumption of similarity with the Ancients comes from the well-known story of a civilizing process in which the French were bonded with these “fathers” who, through a special kinship, would help their “heirs” on their journey to civilization. This story is rooted in the medieval myths of the translatio studii and the translatio imperii, both of which expressed that kinship. These myths proclaimed the Greeks and Romans as the French nation’s true ancestors and rejected its more proximate kin in its own medieval past. In this imagined relationship, the Greeks transferred (translatio) their learning (studium) and their political power or legitimacy (imperium) first to the Romans and then to the French. According to this fictive construct, the Greco-Romans chose the French to carry forth their cultural patrimony, thus conferring on them the right, as well as the duty, to bring enlightenment to the world’s barbarians. Given such an illustrious legacy, the French elite imagined themselves as selfconfident subjects who occupied equivalent positions of strength and power, akin to the Ancients. My book challenges both assumptions. I ask the Ancients to make room for the New World sauvage in a larger, triangulated model for France’s literary and cultural history. I argue that France’s elite carved out their nation’s emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, situating it between barbarism and civilization. However, elite France’s relationship to both worlds was double. Although the French elite wanted to view the Greco-Romans as an “us,” imagining themselves in the same dominant position of imperial greatness as their supposed ancestors, this image is only partial. The standard paradigm has left out the second half of the dynamic: many intellectuals also resented the Ancients as their former colonizers, an imperial “them” from whom they struggled to separate themselves. As much as the elite longed to identify with the Ancients as an “us” and claim a fundamental similarity, they also found themselves falling off this pedestal and into the position of the other. Their otherness came from two opposing impulses. On the negative side, the elite feared that their differences from their models signaled their inferiority. More positively, the elite defiantly asserted their differences to claim their independence. And yet, their struggle for liberation was troubled by the fact that they also admired the Ancients, from whom they longed to inherit the language of power, authority, and civilization. (Early modern France thus faced many of the same dilemmas that France’s former African and Asian colonies

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confronted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) In brief, this book’s new paradigm casts elite France in a love-hate relationship toward the Ancients, depending upon whether the nation imagined itself as a fellow colonizer or as the colonized. Similarly, elite France’s relationship to the New World was also double. On the positive side, the relations de voyage portrayed France as a colonizer akin to the Greeks and Romans who was civilizing the Amerindians as the barbarian other. But these texts also slipped into a negative dynamic, representing the Amerindians too as an “us,” as kin resembling the Gauls in their most primitive stage of existence. The relations recounted many stories that reversed the power dynamic, expressing the French fear that they were backsliding into barbarism and being colonized by the New World Indians. This fear of being akin to the Amerindians as the colonized other tapped into the French elite’s nascent doubts about themselves due to their own more archaic drama when their ancestors were the colonized other in relation to the Romans and Greeks. In sum, the dilemmas of both stories mirrored each other in that the Amerindians were both a “them” and an “us,” just as the Romans were also both an “us” and a “them.” The “us-them” boundaries were blurred on opposite ends of the imagined barbarism-civilization continuum. I will argue that the French elite carved out the nation’s emerging cultural identity in relation to both ends of the spectrum. In presenting a new, triangulated paradigm for understanding early modern French culture, I want to insist that no single, fixed triangulation can capture the complexity of its dynamics. Because elite France had a double relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, the nature of its triangulation will shift continually. This book challenges the dominant paradigm in yet another way. The paradigm’s master narrative was virtually silent about colonization. But this silence does not mean that colonization was insignificant for the nation’s selfunderstanding. Rather, this silence reflects the nation’s official rhetoric, which obscured its colonial dynamics. This rhetoric loudly trumpeted the nation’s imperial greatness through various spectacles, monuments, buildings, literary texts, art forms, and theatrical and musical events, as numerous scholars have detailed. This rhetoric presented France as if it were the New Rome and the New Athens rolled into one. But as Orest Ranum has shown in Artisans of Glory, the official discourse should not be taken at face value, because it simply repeated the cultural topoi and rhetorical commonplaces of heroic kingship.70 Its conventions were, in effect, a political and cultural slant that did not represent the historical reality since it excluded lesser events or fears

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as unworthy of the nation’s elevated status. This rhetoric expressed the church and state’s hopes for greatness, just as the political press releases coming out of the White House in the United States or the Elysée Palace in France reflect not the historical or political reality but the particular angles the respective heads of state wish to promote. Thus, when France’s educated elite launched their relentless barrage of self-aggrandizement, they did so not necessarily out of self-confidence or a firm belief in their position as the true heirs to the Ancient World. They also did so out of a contrary and compensatory impulse: an anxiety about barbarism that made the elite fear they might be more akin to the New World sauvages than to the Ancients. Early modern France’s massive image-making campaign accomplished its goal: scholars have subsequently dubbed the seventeenth century “the great century” (“le grand siècle”), and commonplace phrases such as “the glory of France” and “the genius of the language” have been repeated so often that they are considered indisputably true. France’s journey to civilization has come to seem like a destiny so natural and fully realized that nation’s beginning point in barbarism has dropped out of the picture, and replaced by the image of eternal greatness. With such a grandiose narrative firmly in place, it now seems implausible to think that the French cultured elite could have seriously feared that they were barbaric, and that the memory of their colonized past could have had any genuine hold over them. The story I will be telling may at first seem invraisemblable because the nation’s cultural story has been so completely detached from its colonial story. My goal is to reattach the two stories to show how the nation’s dominant cultural discourse has told only one half of the full story. In including colonization within the nation’s dominant cultural narrative about itself, I am building on the important work of Hélène MerlinKajman in La langue est-elle fasciste? She is the first literary scholar to accord the Roman colonization of the Gauls the central place that it deserves within French cultural history for the seventeenth century. Focusing on the elite’s struggle to defend the vernacular, she astutely argues that this struggle was a war of independence from France’s former colonizers in order to create their own, independent cultural identity.71 After bringing France’s colonized past into the picture, however, MerlinKajman argues that the early modern lettrés transcended their troubled political relation to the Romans. They were able to view Latin as a cultural model separate from a political one. After the Roman Empire disappeared, French intellectuals were able to detach Latin’s power from the historical moment of

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colonial domination. Because Latin was associated with Christianity, French intellectuals divested Latin of its original power dynamic.72 As the language of the church, Latin could create new social bonds that differed from a colonial subjection to Rome. Objectively speaking, Merlin-Kajman is correct. France’s world of letters transcended the nation’s colonized past by creating a powerful language and a truly great world culture. That is clear. But subjectively speaking, the intellectuals’ transcendence of this past was only partial. Their obsession with imitation was a symptom of an underlying insecurity, reflecting an anxiety that they did not yet measure up to a standard that the Greeks and Romans represented. Thus, what Merlin-Kajman sees as success, I see as a site of struggle. As much as the elite sought to transcend their problematic colonial relation to Ancient Rome, they were unable to completely erase this past. Its vestigial traces exerted a strong undercurrent that became obsessive in its pull and shaped France’s literary culture from below. The dominant, winning narrative was aimed at transcendence—it pushed the nation’s colonized past into the shadows by focusing on France’s upward progression toward civilization. The latent memory of the losing narrative, however, kept pulling the elite consciousness downward, with the nation’s most basic anxieties about the original colonial dynamic seeping back in through the dark alleys of the mind. This tension will be central to my analysis. In bringing the darker side of the nation’s literary and cultural history to the surface, I do not mean to diminish France’s remarkable cultural and political achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although many French writers were haunted by their nation’s barbarian past, their fears did not hinder their ability to produce some of the greatest works of world literature. Indeed, it is likely that these fears gave them a heightened sensibility and a sharpness of insight that made this extraordinary flourishing of genius possible. The greatness of these works themselves is thus not in question. I am concerned rather with the anxieties that these writers experienced (and that their texts reflect). As is well known, a disjunction often separates one’s accomplishments as seen from the outside from how one feels about them from the inside.73 Objectively, one would think that France’s writers would have felt very self-confident given their outstanding accomplishments. But subjectively, they experienced fears that may not seem rational to us now. This subjective experience was important, however, because it covertly shaped the development of France’s literature, culture, and history from below the threshold of awareness.

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In offering a new paradigm for the early modern period, this book also provides an important foundation for understanding contemporary France. Many of the same questions are still very much alive today and are illuminated by this earlier history, as my concluding chapter will explore.

Organization of the Book This book is divided into three parts. Part I develops France’s colonial relation to the Ancient World by exploring the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Chapter 1 explores why the French imitation of the Greco-Romans was so explosive that it stimulated heated debates for almost three hundred years. I argue that hidden behind these debates was a colonial history about the Romans as the nation’s former colonizers. The Quarrel’s foundational debate was a “memory war” about whether the Romans were an “us” or an imperial “them.” Were they civilizers or colonizers? As a consequence of this war, the memory that the Romans were colonizers faded from view and they were framed as civilizers. Chapter 2 shows that the memory of the nation’s colonized past did not completely disappear. The latent memory of this past resurfaced in the genre of the “defense.” The nation’s elite mounted a defense against the legacy of the nation’s colonized past. Part II analyzes France’s colonial relation to the New World through a study of the relations de voyage. Chapter 3 discusses the status of these texts. They were widely circulated in early modern France as part of a publicity campaign because they were an arm of the Catholic Reformation. Paradoxically, were it not for the Catholic Reformation, the image of the New World sauvage would not have sunk its claws as deeply in the French imagination as it did. As texts that made the nation’s stories of assimilation well known to France’s cultured elite, the relation was an important site where the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses intersected. Chapter 4 analyses the church and state’s assimilation strategy in the New World. I argue that assimilation presented a boundary dilemma by encouraging outsiders on the edge of civilization to become transformed and enter the French, Catholic community so fully that intermarriage was an ideal. But were the New World barbarians really an “us” or a “them”? The assimilation policy mirrored the dilemma the cultured elite faced: were the Romans an “us” or a “them”? Part III weaves the two different colonial stories together into a shifting series of triangulated configurations and argues that the nation’s culture

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emerged in relation to the colonial dynamics of its Ancient World and New World connections. Chapter 5 shows how the colonial discourse about the New World sauvage was interwoven with the nation’s cultural debates about its relationship to the Ancient World. This chapter provides an introduction to the next three chapters, which form a unit, by reframing the Quarrel’s debates as offering a competing set of proposed escape routes to help the nation transcend the bind of its own barbaric, colonized past and cultivate an independent civilization worthy of pride and dignity. Each of the following chapters offers a competing triangulated escape route to arrive at that goal. Chapter 6 centers on imitation as a proposed escape from barbarism. Typically, scholars examine imitation within a cultural context, viewing it as a “civilizing process” and presupposing that the Ancients were beneficent models and allies to help elite France along its desired path. This chapter expands the meaning of imitation by also examining it within the nation’s colonial discourse. Here imitation functioned as a “voluntary subjection,” stimulating a subjugating process. Many lettrés saw the Ancients as an imperial “them” and feared that imitating them would not lead out of the colonial bind; the most fundamental thought structures they were imitating reinforced the original power dynamic that relegated the French to the position of the barbarian other. In Chapter 7 imitation offers a second proposed escape route. But here imitation is understood through a different interweaving of the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses. The relations often highlighted the Amerindians as an “us,” long-lost kin to justify colonization. These texts stimulated what I call a “crisis of similarity” with the barbaric. In this context, imitation of the Ancients took on the function of guarding against a regression into barbarism. Imitation served as a life raft to prevent elite France from sliding back on the evolutionary continuum toward the primitive stage of the Amerindians. In the first two escape routes, neither path was able to liberate the French elite from their fear of barbarism. Both were locked in a binary battle that defined and measured France in relation to Greece and Rome. This binary struggle would endure as long as the elite continued to uphold the Ancients as the model for what they wanted to become. Chapter 8 examines the most successful route out of the bind in which the moderns looked to the New World as a third term. They used the concept of the sauvage as a lens through which to look at the Ancient World. The sauvage became a lever to undo the binary oppositions of the Ancient World, enabling the moderns to conceptualize an idea of progress that would reverse the slope of history and break the pull back

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to the Ancient World. The sauvage and the New World enabled the moderns to conceptualize a future that represented an evolutionary advance over the past, not a fall from it. In this way, the moderns built a new road to modernity and ushered in the Enlightenment. The conclusion ends the book by examining the implications of this new early modern paradigm for understanding the modern era. Each of the book’s chapters is cumulative, building on arguments set forth in the previous chapters. Thus one should read the chapters in sequence to make each seem plausible and to grasp the full force of the overarching argument.

Part I

France’s Colonial Relation to the Ancient World

chapter 1

The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle The Memory Wars over “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

The Puzzle of the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns What was the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns? When did it take place? Numerous scholars see it as a late seventeenth-century phenomenon that began in 1687 when all hell broke loose on the French Academy floor.1 It was set off by a seemingly minor event at what was to be a standard Academy meeting. Charles Perrault had opened the session by reciting a poem he had written, “The Century of Louis the Great.” While Perrault was reading, Boileau kept muttering to himself and fidgeting in his seat, making wisecracks under his breath, much like Alceste in Molière’s Le misanthrope listening to Oronte’s poem. Finally Boileau, outraged, leaped to his feet and railed against the poem so strongly that he eventually lost his voice. As an ancient in this instance, Boileau found Perrault’s poem objectionable because it was “scandalous to read [a poem] that criticized the great men of antiquity.”2 As a champion of the moderns, Perrault refused to imitate the Greeks and Romans and kneel at their altar. He felt that France’s contemporary writers had not only equaled those of Ancient Greece and Rome but even surpassed them. After all, they had one key advantage over their predecessors—they had the good fortune to live in the reign of Louis XIV. Had Homer, Virgil, and Ovid lived in the age of the Sun King, they would have been even better writers, Perrault claimed. In cutting the Ancients down to size, Perrault was questioning how much France’s writers should imitate them, and he proposed that they chart 31

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a new course for themselves. For Boileau, this was blasphemy and more than he could bear. Boileau’s histrionic outburst called for war. And war it was—for decades to come. Sounding a call for armies to form, this incident induced scores of writers to stake out positions on the literary and cultural battlefield, aligning themselves with either an ancient or a modern camp. Numerous participants used the term “war” in the titles of their works: Gabriel Gueret wrote La guerre des auteurs anciens et modernes (1671); François de Caillières, L’Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes (1688). Longpierre came to Boileau’s defense in his Discours sur les anciens (1687). Perrault responded to Boileau with his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, which came out in intervals between 1688 and 1697. Fontenelle wrote Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688) and other responses to these same issues, such as De l’origine des fables, Dialogues des morts, and Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683). Numerous other texts addressed this central conflict, such as Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690), which structured many word definitions in terms of an opposition between “les anciens” and “les modernes.” Thus, in the late seventeenth century the Quarrel reached a particularly high level of self-consciousness, bringing into public discourse scenarios of war that pitted ancients against moderns. The feverish intensity of this cultural discourse accounts for why most scholars associate the Quarrel with this period more than any other. I recount this famous feud between Boileau and Perrault in order to highlight the puzzling nature of the Quarrel. How could a trivial personal squabble have ignited such an important and explosive set of debates? What was really at stake? The imitation of the Ancients was the stated issue: What was the status of France’s writers as imitators of Ancient texts? How closely were they to imitate the models of antiquity? To what extent were France’s writers free to invent new paths that reflected their own experience and their own truths?33 I am not suggesting that these questions were trivial. Obviously, they were very important. Rather, I am suggesting that they were not sufficient to justify the intense, emotional reaction they unleashed. The Quarrel is puzzling because of the strange disproportion between its stated issues and its frenzied feelings. This disproportion becomes even more accentuated when we consider the duration of the Quarrel. Scholars differ on how to date it. Many date it to before the seventeenth century, interpreting it as a vast, sprawling, and amorphous set of controversies that include Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) as a key moment. Hundreds of other writers, both before Du Bellay and after him, took up their pens to prove the worth of

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the French language and of its literary culture in relation to that of Ancient Greece and Rome. But precisely how far back the Quarrel extends is unclear. Hubert Gillot reasonably traced it back to the late fifteenth century.4 Similarly, the Quarrel’s forward reach is also unclear. Marc Fumaroli and Anne-Marie Lecoq expanded it to 1761, although one could plausibly stretch that date even further forward to encompass Victor Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell, published in 1827.5 My point, however, is not so much to set exact dates in either direction as to emphasize the Quarrel’s long duration. If these debates generated enough passion to last three centuries, they had to have hit a very raw and powerful nerve. But what was it? Why was imitation such an explosive issue? This strange disproportion has caused many scholars to trivialize the Quarrel and yet acknowledge its importance. The term itself, “Quarrel,” suggests a trivialization, lacking the weightiness of its British counterpart, the Battle of the Books, as Joan DeJean has rightly observed.6 Ernest Curtius implicitly trivialized the Quarrel by seeing in it simply a standard conflict between the old and the new.7 Acknowledging the long-standing trivialization, Terence Cave has suggested that the Quarrel’s “surprising virulence” may have caused the “histories of literature . . . [to] treat the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns as a rather parochial dispute among French lettrés of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.”8 In some sense, most scholars have been hard pressed to explain what was really at stake, which is precisely why many trivialize it. 9 Or they just assume that time has dulled its edge because the issues that were important then have lost their sharpness for us now. In this chapter, I argue that imitation was an explosive issue because it hit a nerve that neither we nor the Quarrel’s participants fully understood. It is not unusual for individuals or groups to become embroiled in emotional disputes over issues they cannot articulate or even fathom. Not uncommonly, they displace the real issue with smaller, more trivial ones. All they know is that they experience anxiety and anger but cannot name their real source. The early modern writers could not name it because they did not have the language or conceptual tools to do so. They called it imitation, but this word hid a deeper conflict. This chapter unearths this buried conflict by extending the Quarrel’s foundations back to the late fifteenth century. The late seventeenth-century debates were simply the tip of a giant iceberg that was connected, at the base, to the debates of the late medieval era. The issues varied over the centuries, to be sure; but they were nevertheless all still part of one large, overarching set of controversies that constitute the Quarrel. Stretching the Quarrel’s foundational moment back

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two centuries is hardly a quibble about dates or nomenclature. It reflects the Quarrel’s larger dimensions by exposing the roots from which its debates about imitation have been severed: France’s colonized past. This past, however, was invented in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when France’s humanists exhumed the Gauls, claiming them as ancestors to escape Greco-Roman domination and suffocation, as discussed in the previous chapter. This proposed Gallic heritage gave rise to the Quarrel’s foundational battle. It was a “memory war” about the writing of French history. Were the Romans an “us” or a “them”? The meaning of imitation would ultimately be shaped by the outcome of this memory war. Were the elite imitating models from their civilizers or from their former colonizers? Would the imitation of Roman thought forms liberate the French or subjugate their hearts and minds? This foundational question gave imitation a sharp edge. This chapter thus uncovers the memory war at the base of the Quarrel and discusses how it mattered for France’s cultural self-understanding.But before doing so, it is important to elucidate its key terms, “ancient” and “modern.” It is difficult to define them in a stable and meaningful way, for several reasons. First, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the term “Ancient” referred both to the Ancient Greeks and Romans as well as to France’s early modern writers who fused their identity with their models. This very confusion comes out of the colonial dilemma I am discussing: the ancients had internalized the discourse of the Ancients and (con)fused their identity with them. Second, the term “Ancient” is problematic because it conflates the Greeks and Romans as if they were essentially the same. However, Rome was much more important for France than was Ancient Greece. Anthony Pagden observed that Rome in particular “provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium Romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of Western Europe.”10 The Romans were the more important model, which also made them greater figures of resentment. The effects of Roman rule were present in the every day life of France’s cultured elite, especially in their language, law, and customs.11 Many members of the French elite used the term “Rome” as a code word to express their anger against several different adversaries, as I indicated in the previous chapter. Resentful of the Romans, many men of letters turned toward the Greeks as an alternative. Hellenism came into vogue in the 1550s with Ronsard’s attempt to counter the “Latinate” poets from Lyon. Others, such as Henri Estienne and

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Blasset, argued that French derived etymologically from Greek, not Latin.12 The Greeks, however, were hardly a safe haven, since they were problematic in yet other respects. Thus, although I will usually differentiate the Romans from the Greeks, at other times I will group them together as Ancients because many Romans, seeing the Greeks as their cultural masters, absorbed a number of their assumptions, values, and beliefs as foundations for their own, making it impossible to consistently differentiate Greek from Roman culture. Third, the term “ancient” is confused in its relation to “modern” because the implied opposition does not hold firm. Neither camp can be aligned with a systematic, consistent set of beliefs. Most authors do not fit squarely on one side or the other, because many were modern with respect to some issues and ancient with respect to others. Moreover, the categories “modern” and “ancients” were themselves not clearly fixed, for they often slipped into their opposite. Thus these labels do not appear to be meaningful, since they do not have a rational consistency. This instability is perhaps one reason why many scholars tend to trivialize the Quarrel and have not accorded its debates the great importance they deserve. More generally, it should be observed that the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns existed within several different fields of inquiry. I focus on imitation as a literary and cultural conflict to defend the nation’s language and letters. The battles in this conflict were bound up with the construction of French history. I separate out these literary and cultural battles from the related conflicts in philosophy and science, which overlapped at their core. In science and philosophy, Francis Bacon and René Descartes were moderns who challenged the standard beliefs about what counts as “knowledge.”13 They asked: By what methods does one pursue knowledge? What are its sources? Who are its authorities? What are its goals? While these questions are linked to the nation’s literary and cultural battles, their connections lie beyond our present concerns.

The Memory War of the Two Gauls When the French cultured elite exhumed the Gauls and enthroned them as their ancestors, they faced a central question: Which Gauls did they have in mind? The Gauls were not a monolithic unit; rather, they could be divided into multiple subgroups.14 The major distinction here is not the difference between the Gauls and the Celts, since most historians use these terms interchangeably,

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as do I.15 Instead, the most important distinction I am making is between the Gauls before colonization and after colonization. Some sixteenth-century intellectuals (whom I loosely label “moderns”) championed an independent, precolonized image of the Gauls to break with their former colonizers and promote a growing collective awareness. These intellectuals encountered one key problem, however. To push Gallic history back this far meant that their ancestors were barbarians: a wild, lawless, and nomadic band of primitives, or so the Romans and Hellenistic Greeks claimed. For this reason, other sixteenth-century humanists (whom I loosely call “ancients”) imagined the Gauls after colonization, when they were already civilized and lived in cities with sophisticated political and social structures. The drawback of the latter Gauls, however, was that they were a colonized people who became Romanized Gauls. (I prefer the phrase “Romanized Gauls” over “Gallo-Roman” because the former reflects the dominant French perception that tipped the scale toward the Roman side; the civilizing process meant Romanization. Many of the French elite did not see the Gauls as equal partners in the mix.) These competing versions of the Gauls incited a memory war. Which version of France’s ancestors would ultimately win out? The independent, precolonized, but barbaric, version? Or the civilized, but colonized, version? This question was central to the Quarrel’s foundational battle in the sixteenth century. To reformulate the issue more broadly: At what point did French “history” begin? When did France become “France”? Whereas some moderns thought it began with the Gauls in their early precolonized state, some ancients thought it began only once the Gauls had already been transformed into civilized, Romanized beings, who had been colonized and assimilated into the Roman Empire. The stakes were high because the outcome would shape France’s emerging cultural identity. The Romanized version of France’s ancestors obviously prevailed since this narrative has now become so familiar that it may seem odd to imagine that an alternative view could have ever been possible. We tend to assume that the moderns by definition always win out. But that was not always the case. Here, the ancients won out over the moderns.16 This outcome has shaped the writing of French cultural history. To this day, most historians begin France’s history when the Gauls were on the cusp of civilization, after they had been cleaned up and made semipresentable. This narrative frames the nation’s development as a “civilizing process,” as Norbert Elias has called it.17 It starts after the Gauls had already been colonized, thus relegating France’s colonial past to a prehistory that did not really matter. But Suzanne Citron and other

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historians have recently argued that this era did matter and was an important part of the nation’s past.18 Of course, the traditional historical narrative does acknowledge that the Gauls were once barbarians whom the Romans conquered and dominated. However, after admitting these facts, the dominant narrative simply pays lip service to them in one brief moment and then disavows their significance in another. It covers them up so that their threatening potential is muted and only partially acknowledged.19 Citron’s goal has been to give greater significance to this earlier era as part of her larger effort to alter the traditional construct of French history. In sum, French writers were at a crossroads in constructing a narrative about their nation’s self-understanding in the sixteenth century. That narrative could have begun with an earlier, independent, precolonized version of Gaul. However, because its modern advocates lost, the story of French history began as the ancients wished—when the Gauls were already on the verge of being Romanized/civilized, identified with the Roman colonizers. The memory of colonization faded because the ancients succeeded in framing Roman colonization as a civilizing process. My goal is thus to reconstruct the path not taken, and the past not taken. Where did the Franks fit into the story of the two Gauls? As Colette Beaune, Michel Foucault, and Claude Nicolet have all noted, the Franks were major contenders for the role of ancestors.20 But the Franks were not seen as an absolute origin, since they themselves had an important ancestry. Did they descend from the Trojans or from the Gauls? Until the sixteenth century, the French elite imagined that the Franks had descended from the Trojans. This lineage aligned the Franks/French with the Romans, since they were both refugees from Troy. As brothers, the Franks/French could lay claim to becoming heirs to the Roman Empire, inheriting the same rights and powers that the Roman emperor enjoyed over his subjects. As Foucault observed, to assert that the Franks were descended from the Trojans was to claim that “France was just as imperial as all the Roman Empire’s other descendants; it was just as imperial as the German Empire . . . and it was not subordinated to any Germanic Caesar.”21 In short, a Frankish/Trojan ancestry established continuity with Ancient Rome. However, other French writers preferred a Gallic ancestry to a Frankish/ Trojan one, precisely in order to break with Rome. In 1511–13, Jean Lemaire de Belges published Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie, which dramatized how the Gauls had founded Troy, thus placing the Gauls at the root of the Frankish family tree.22 So according to De Belges, both the Franks and

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the Trojans descended from the Gauls.23 After De Belges, many other writers repeated this myth that placed the Gauls at the origin of both the Trojans and the Franks. Guillaume Postel’s Histoire mémorable (1532), Ronsard’s Franciade (1572), Guillaume du Bellay’s Epitomé des antiquités des Gaules et de la France (1556), Jean Bodin’s La méthode de l’histoire (1566), François Hotman’s FrancoGallia (1573), and Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–1627) all traced the Franks back to the Gauls. Needless to say, each writer had different motivations for preferring the Gauls over the Trojans as ancestors of the Franks. For example, Bodin’s insistence on the Gallic origins of the Franks was a competition with Germany, as Nicolet has emphasized. But it was also an anti-Roman move. In La méthode de l’histoire, Bodin described how “the Gauls, tired of their servitude to the Romans, emigrated beyond the Rhine, . . . and as soon as they could, they hastened to cast off the yoke of the Romans, to return to their homeland and to take on the name of the Franks, that is to say of free men.”24 When Hotman aligned the Franks with the Gauls in his Franco-Gallia, he was motivated, in part, by his Protestantism. But fundamentally what united these writers was that they were all anti-Roman. Although many French intellectuals increasingly aligned the Franks with the Gauls, they obviously did not see these two sets of ancestors as the same. They highlighted one part of their Gallic/Frankish heritage over the other, depending on the particular battle they were fighting. For example, the French nobility of the sword traced their descent and legal status to the Franks. But many French lettrés needed an ancestry that was of more ancient origin than that of Greece or Rome, as we will see, and thus they emphasized the nation’s Gallic ancestry over its Frankish roots in their literary and cultural debates.

The Precolonized Gauls When several moderns first proposed a Gallic heritage, they did so because this ancestry offered a road to independence. The Gauls predated the Greeks and Romans. Such a Gallic ancestry was desirable because the earliest Gauls existed in an independent, precolonized state, which enabled French writers to liberate themselves from their cultural memory of a past colonial subjection by providing an alternative lineage. In 1556, Guillaume du Bellay felt suffocated by France’s “previous submission to the Romans” and wanted to “vindicate and take back [the Gauls’] former freedom and natural liberty, except for their constrained submission. . . . Seeking to recover this liberty, they

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have persevered in this endeavor up until now and will continue to do so forever, as is the will of God.”25 The Gauls’ “former freedom and natural liberty” was their greatest appeal, and thus Du Bellay, by definition, conjured up a precolonized Gaul. The moderns used the Gauls to help fight distinct but interrelated cultural, legal, political, and religious battles. On the cultural level, the Gauls’ supposed antecedence would enable the humanists to reverse the hierarchy of civilizations, so that the Gauls’ ancientness would confer on the French a greater prestige. In a world that assumed that nature was degenerative (a belief the French adopted from the Greeks), being “firstborn” would grant the Gauls/French superiority over later arrivals on the scene of human (European) history. According to the Greek theory of the degeneration of nature, the civilizations that were born first were of the highest stock, as if Mother Nature was a creature with finite resources who became so exhausted after giving birth that all her subsequent creations were more base. If French intellectuals could show that the Gauls were of more ancient origin than the Greeks or Romans, they could then hope to reverse the hierarchy that devalued France as derivative. These moderns, however, needed to prove not simply that the Gauls were the first to exist but also that they were civilized, which meant that they had a world of letters. According to Guillaume le Rouille’s Recueil de l’antique préexcellence de Gaule et des Gaulois (1546), the Gauls then passed this learning on to Ancient Greece and Rome. Rouille wrote: “I shall demonstrate that the Gauls conquered and subjugated not only Rome, but also Italy and all of Europe as well as a great part of Asia . . . and that letters and sciences originated from Gaul, and that the Gauls of native Gaul were and still are more excellent than all others.”26 Guillaume des Autelz, author of Réplique aux furieuses deffences de Louis Meigret (1556), theorized that Latin was derived from French, concluding that “the Latins have learned their language from the French, rather than the other way around.”27 Guillaume Postel, one of the most learned and significant intellectuals of this period, reversed the hierarchical relationship in his De originibus (1538): “It seems to me likely that the Gauls lacked letters until the arrival of the Phoenicians, who founded Massilia in the south of Gaul . . . from them, therefore, the Gauls, putting away their barbarism and becoming civilized, learned the ways of a cultivated life, and how to till their fields, and to surround their cities with walls. Then they accustomed themselves to plant the olive, to prune the vine, and to live by laws, not by arms. And civilization both in human and material things seems to have developed

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to such a degree that it passed, not from Greece into Gaul, but from Gaul into Greece.”28 Seeking to change the translatio studii route, Petrus Ramus (also known as Pierre de la Ramée) stated in his Grammaire that the Gauls already had knowledge of the liberal arts. From Gaul, this knowledge traveled to Greece and then to Rome before finally returning home to France: “Grammar and all the other liberal disciplines were long ago in the Gallic Language and in the schools of our Druids owing nothing at all either to the Greeks or to the Latins: and this learning afterwards having left Gaul with the Gauls went to Greece, where it was greatly cherished and honored, and from there it was invited to Italy, and to every part of the world.”29 According to Ramus, France’s Latin cultural heritage was a Gallic humanism, a fact that was lost after the Roman conquest. The Gauls were forced to learn Latin. As a consequence, the Gauls lost not only their own language but also their cultural heritage. Ramus saw the Roman conquest of Gaul as a cultural holocaust. Rather than bring civilization to the conquered peoples, the Romans destroyed all of the Gauls’ scientific and literary traditions. Honoré d’Urfé situated his novel L’Astrée in Gaul and claimed that its civilization pre-dated that of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Gallic traditions, not Roman culture or Roman Christianity, shaped the true essence of the Franks and of the French monarchy, according to Kathleen Wine’s interpretation of this novel.30 These alternative narratives of cultural transmission might now seem fanciful and amusing to scholars, especially because we are so accustomed to the opposite, but these stories expressed an important emotional truth that is valid regardless of its factual truth or falsity. These narratives underscore the humanists’ wounded pride and anger at their subordination to the Ancients. For many moderns, then, the early, precolonized Gauls constituted the road to recovering their lost dignity. Similarly, French legal and political theorists appealed to a precolonial theory of power to question some of the most reprehensible aspects of absolute power resting on Roman law. The persecution of the Protestants prompted several theorists such as François Hotman to challenge the king’s absolute authority by looking to the Gauls as France’s ancestors. The Gauls served Hotman as a political tool to argue for a “sovereignty of the people,” grounded in the Gauls’ “first liberty.”31 Hotman was a “monarchomaque,” that is, a member of a group of jurists and theorists who, shortly after the infamous and inflammatory St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, seriously entertained a theory of tyrannicide as permissible if the king violated what was perceived as a contract between God and the people. For the most part, the monarchomaques were

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anti-Roman and used the Gauls to challenge the validity of a legal system inherited from Rome, and the royal authority anchored in it. Underlining his anti-Roman stance, Hotman championed Gaul “before it was subjected and reduced into a Province by the Romans” in his Franco-Gallia (1573 and 1576). Opposing kingly government, Hotman exalted the Gauls in their first, free state because they executed those who aspired to put them “under the Government of a single Person.”32 After celebrating the Gauls in their first, free state, Hotman then described “the State of Gaul, after it was reduced into the form of a Province by the Romans.” He resented the Romans for stealing the Gauls’ cherished liberty, changing their laws and customs, and “oppress[ing them] with perpetual Slavery.” The Gauls, Hotman argued, hated the Romans, who were “cruel and inhuman” and “suck’d out the very Blood of the Provincials.”33 Describing the various forms of servitude to which the Romans subjected them, Hotman was particularly angered that the Gauls “were not permitted to be governed by their own Laws, but had Magistrates and Judges, with full Power and Authority over Life and Estate, sent them by the People of Rome.”34 Hotman upheld the Franks as heroes, regarding them as having freed the Gauls from their Roman oppressors. The Franks were lovers of freedom: “by a Frank was meant a Freeman, . . . and Francisare signified to restore to liberty and freedom.”35 The Franks “delivered France from the tyranny and oppression of the Romans.”36 Thus began an alliance of Franks and Gauls. As Hotman’s title suggested, a Franco-Gallia should replace a Roman-Gallia. Hotman constructed a new Franco-Gallic lineage to argue that the king’s power was not absolute. His logic was premised on the fact that the Frankish tribes elected their king. Because the populus conferred power on the king, they could revoke the king’s authority if he abused it. Hotman’s argument was part and parcel of the French tradition that sought to reduce the Roman influence in law. Those who followed France’s tradition of teaching law, the mos gallicus, often evoked a pre-Roman or precolonial era to contest the validity of Roman law in many different domains, but especially the part that accorded the king absolute power. Equally anti-Roman, Etienne Pasquier, a jurist and a historian, was a pivotal figure in the struggle to reconstruct a pre-Roman past for France, since he based the nation’s Gallic ancestry on historical documentation, not myth or flights of fancy. He devoted almost sixty years to documenting and reconfiguring France’s lineage. He stated that he wrote his Recherches de la France (1560) to “avenge our France from the injury of the years.”37 The target of his revenge was the Ancient Romans, who had stolen the Gauls’ liberty. Pasquier

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also targeted the contemporary Italians who had accused French humanists of barbarism.38 He complained of Petro Crinit who “each time he mentioned the Gauls, he qualified them as clumsy oafs or barbarians.”39 To counter this damage, Pasquier wanted to return to the “true and primitive laws of France” and throw off the yoke of Roman law. “It is high time that we rid ourselves of that stupid notion . . . by which we trample under foot the true and primitive laws of France and reduce all our judgments to those of the Romans. . . . God wished to separate us from Italy by a high thrust of mountains, so He separated us in all things, in manners, in laws, character, humors.”40 The Gauls whom Pasquier admired were those who sought escape from the “foreign servitude” that the Romans had imposed on them.41 He railed against the “superstitious servitude in which we imprison our minds by following [Roman] law.”42 Pasquier’s Gaul was one that predated the Romans’ arrival, for he wanted to recover “this first liberty that Caesar had stolen.”43 His praise of the Gauls arose from his hatred of France’s inherited Roman legal system. However, one huge roadblock impeded the recovery of the Gauls’ “first liberty.” No written documents recorded the Gauls’ history. How, then, could France’s early modern writers construct their own ancestral history? Pasquier complained that “the honor of our good ancestors has remained buried in the grave of our forgetfulness.”44 So how could he “transmit to posterity anything about our triumphs?”45 The Gauls’ lack of historical writing meant that “we only know [about the Gauls] through a historical borrowing,” because Pasquier was forced to use Greek and Roman writings as his sources.46 But that borrowed lens was distorted because the Ancients had demeaned the Gauls as the barbarian other. Pasquier continually railed against Livy in particular, as a “perpetual enemy of the Gallic name.”47 But he also reserved large doses of bile for Strabo and Diodorus. To write a new French history of the Gauls, he had to borrow from the same sources that had debased the nation’s ancestors. In short, the nation’s colonized past put him in a bind; it meant France’s ancestors left no written accounts of their own and he was forced to turn to the very texts whose ideology he was trying to overthrow. The writing of French history thus became a site of struggle in which the moderns developed a “new history” to respond to this dilemma. The term “new history” was not anachronistic; it figured in the title, Dessein de l’histoire nouvelle des Français (1598), written by Henri de La Popelinière who was also a Protestant, like Hotman. The other major proponents of a new history were Bodin, Budé, Le Roys, and Vignier, although Pasquier was its most successful practitioner, in George Huppert’s estimation.48 This new history proposed

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what Foucault would centuries later call a “counter-discourse,” a designation that postcolonial theorists have subsequently used.49 Pasquier’s new history challenged the authority of Greek and Roman historians such as Diodorus, Strabo, Livy, and even Caesar to tell the story of France’s ancestors. It did so by emphasizing that the Hellenistic Greeks and Romans were either ignorant or liars, biased against the Gauls.50 Pasquier charged that “the Roman historiographers” sought to “downplay our virtues that they could not steal from us” by making up false accusations, such as that “the Gauls were enticed by the sweetness of Italy’s wines.”51 To get beyond the Romans’ bias, he proposed that French writers choose their sources carefully, since some Greeks and Romans were less prejudiced than others. Julius Caesar should be the main source because he was the most respectful: “I have noticed in reading [Caesar] that the word ‘barbarian’ has escaped from his pen only twice in referring to us.”52 Pasquier’s new history thus raised the problematic issues of the proper sources for reconstructing France’s past. Pasquier also proposed a new interpretive strategy that read Greek and Roman historiographers against the grain. He devised techniques to move beyond “the calumnies of some [Greek and Roman] authors who . . . sought to tarnish our victories.”53 This new kind of reading would look between the lines to tease out some facts and events that the Ancients presented, but then reject their interpretations. It would focus on the contradictions in the Ancients’ texts. If French historians pursued their implications, these texts would suggest the very opposite of what their Greek and Roman authors intended: Given that the authority of some Latin authors has, over the long passage of time, insinuated itself or, more precisely, refined itself such that it is reputed to be true, it is difficult to uproot the commonly accepted opinion, especially when our understanding remains within the limits of a single narrator. We cannot correct such authors because we also learn from them. But sometimes, wishing to denigrate our victories to aggrandize their own, [the Latin authors] do not realize that they contradict themselves; that is to say, they portray events to make us look bad. Nevertheless, whoever would fit all the pieces of their narrative together will find that they show the exact opposite.54 After examining what made Caesar, Suetonius, and Tacitus conclude that the Gauls were frivolous and inconstant, Pasquier then turned their logic on its

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head. In his alternative logic, he showed that the Gauls had adopted a clever ruse to make their behavior appear inconstant in order to outsmart the Romans. In his view, “the Gauls’ excessive frivolity did not stem so much from an ‘ill-formed’ brain as from the desire to recover this first liberty, which Caesar has confirmed: their aim was freedom or at least freedom from foreign servitude.”55 To recover their freedom, the Gauls cleverly used the Romans’ own strategy against them. Pasquier’s new reading strategy accounted for the absence of any Gallic writings. According to his alternative logic, the Gauls did not have any written accounts of their history because they purposely chose not to record any. This lack did not signify that they were illiterate. Their priests, the Druids, were highly literate, Pasquier claimed, but they were suspicious of putting their knowledge into writing for many of the same reasons that Plato’s Phaedrus articulated. Basing his argument on Caesar,56 Pasquier insisted that “the Druids were so stingy about committing anything to writing . . . [they were] so skeptical of how posterity might use [this knowledge] that they kept the actions and events of our kings within their own memories.”57 But their guardedness made them vulnerable to a memory theft. The Greeks and Romans stole the Gauls’ memory of themselves, Pasquier asserted. The Druids’ strategic logic was unfortunately turned against them. The Gauls did not protect their memory of themselves because they were preoccupied by war, religion, and justice. Their humanistic letters lagged far behind because the Gauls were more interested in performing “good deeds than in writing about them.”58 Joachim du Bellay made the same argument in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) when he addressed why “our language is not as abundant or as rich as Greek and Latin.” He explained it was due to the “ignorance of our ancestors,” who held “well-doing in higher esteem than fair speaking.”59 The absence of any Gallic texts to tell the Gauls’ own history was at the heart of France’s colonial dilemma. This lack forced many French writers to accept a Greco-Roman interpretation of their own past, which saw the Gauls as illiterate and hence barbaric. Geofroy Tory and others, however, interpreted this absence of writing differently. Based on their reading of Caesar, they argued that the Gauls did have writing. But the Greeks and Romans, fearful and jealous of the Gauls, sought to subjugate them by stealing the sources of their self-understanding. In his Champ Fleury (1529), Tory argued that the Gauls had a “working knowledge of reading and writing. Long before Julius Caesar came to France, philosophers named Druids . . . taught all those who came to memorize countless verses. I cannot say with certainty in which alphabet they

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taught: if it was in Hebraic, Greek, Latin, or French.”60 The Gauls’ writings “were abolished by Julius Caesar. He and the Romans were such greedy seekers of glory” that the Romans, like the Greeks, could not stand sharing the limelight with the Gauls.61 The Romans forced a cultural amnesia on their colonial subjects, “destroying laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers,” Tory wrote.62 By erasing the Gauls’ version of their own past, the Romans could then substitute their alternate version, which vaunted Roman “victories and achievements . . . recorded in their own Latin letters.”63 Joachim du Bellay also accused the Romans of memory theft. In his Défense, Du Bellay argued that the Romans, not satisfied with simply subjugating the Gauls militarily, sought to render them “vile and abject in comparison” by joining together “to conspire against us” to make the Gauls’ great deeds “so poorly preserved, that we have nearly lost not only the glory of them but their very memory.”64 So successful was the Roman campaign that the Gauls’ writings fell irretrievably into oblivion. Without a written history of their own, the Gauls’ descendants had to see themselves through the distorted Greco-Roman memory of them, which was subsequently passed down to posterity, and came to seem true. Du Bellay railed against the Romans, who “to render us still more odious and contemptible, called us brutal, cruel and barbarous.”65 Incensed that the “Romans called us barbarians, given their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory,”66 the poet accused both the Greeks and the Romans of being liars. Thus, at the end of his Défense, Du Bellay castigated the Greeks as “that lying Greece,”67 and he incited his fellow humanists to smash the Greek and Roman treasures on their own altars. “Greek liars” became a rallying cry that other humanists, such as Jodelle, also invoked. This phrase had a Roman counterpart: “the charlatan Romans.”68 As liars, both the Greeks and Romans had invented an alternative past for the Gauls, a humiliating one that painted them as barbarians to make themselves look good. In short, the moderns’ counter-discourse argued that if the Gauls now appeared to be without writing, it was not because they were illiterate. Either the Gauls chose not to write, or if they did, the Romans plotted to erase all traces of those writings. Mainly, the Romans sought to steal the Gauls’ memory from them. The Gauls were targets of theft because their greatness was so monumental and fearsome that the Greeks and Romans became jealous, waging a memory war to wipe them off the map of history. History was thus a major site of the battle between the ancients and the moderns. The moderns accused the

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Greeks and Romans of forcing the Gauls/French to see themselves and their descendants through their colonizers’ eyes. The moderns endeavored to escape this bind by developing a counter-discourse to interpret the colonizers’ texts within an alternative logic. In this way, the proponents of a new history in sixteenth-century France struggled against many of the same issues that today face the inhabitants of France’s former colonies who are engaged in a “politics of memory.”69

The Romanized/Colonized Gauls By contrast, the ancients understood France’s relationship to imperial Rome very differently. They began their construct of French history with a later set of Gauls—those who were being transformed into civilized, Romanized beings. Their construct accepted the Greco-Roman representation of their ancestors as true. To grasp what this internalized version meant, I would first like to return to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman portrait of the Gauls and of their civilizing process. I offered a glimpse of this portrait in the preceding chapter, and we should remember that it is not an accurate historical account of what actually happened but is simply the Greco-Roman representation of the Gauls’ past. As Greg Woolf has stressed, the Romans’ historical and literary accounts of their colonization of Gaul were quite distorted, as the process was much longer and more complicated than the Romans wanted to admit.70 In point of fact, the establishment of a Roman order in Gaul was punctuated with many reversals and violent revolts, with the Gauls mounting great resistance. Nevertheless, I emphasize the dominant Greco-Roman discourse because it, more than the historical reality, shaped the French discourse about their ancestors and themselves. Ultimately this discourse would shape the nation’s own projects as colonizers in the New World and also its nineteenth- and twentiethcentury endeavors in Africa and Asia. Many Hellenistic Greeks and Romans wrote about the Roman colonization of Gaul, describing it as what could anachronistically be called a “civilizing mission.” This term was invented in the nineteenth century to describe the French efforts to civilize and colonize the indigenous inhabitants of their African and Asian territories. However, the concept existed long before the term’s invention, dating back to the Roman colonization of Gaul. The Roman understanding of this concept differed from that of the French since it openly conceived of their civilizing and colonizing missions as fused, as two sides

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of the same phenomenon. The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that the gods had chosen them to conquer, rule, and civilize the world.71 They thought colonization was beneficial because it brought civilization to the barbarians. The Romans used their civilization as an instrument of colonization, spreading humanitas throughout their empire.72 Humanitas provided the condition for human beings to realize their full potential as humans by becoming civilized.73 Pliny the Elder wrote that Rome, “the capital of the world . . . is the nursling and the mother of all other lands, chosen by the providence of the gods to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make manners gentle, to draw together in converse by a community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of so many nations, to give mankind civilization (humanitatem homini daret), and in a word to become throughout the world the single fatherland of all the races.”74 Although the Greeks had invented the concept, the Romans spread humanitas throughout the world. In so doing, they believed they were performing a great service to humankind, transforming the barbarians of the world through civilization, making their “manners gentle,” and uniting them in the Roman civitas. The Romans adopted a “soft” mode of domination, as the sixteenth-century French humanist Geofroy Tory described it. He distinguished between two forms of force, between cultural and military power. Characterizing the first form, he explained that “the Romans, who have dominated the greatest part of the world, have prospered and obtained more victories by their language than by their lance.”75 The Romans used their civilization as a mode of domination, although they also used physical force. Their soft approach to imperial expansion was predicated on the supposition that their civilization was so superior that it would become a magnet for others. Non-Romans, perceiving their own inferiority and wanting to improve their lives, would voluntarily imitate the Romans and cast aside their former ways to become like their chosen models in a Romanizing process. Many Greek and Roman historiographers portrayed the Gauls as good colonial subjects, intelligent enough to recognize Rome’s superiority. Thus the Gauls eagerly “volunteered” to imitate their conquerors. According to Strabo, they were more eager than other peoples to adapt to the Roman way of life: “Again, the Romans conquered these people much more easily than they did the Iberians.”76 He further commented: “If coaxed, they so easily yield to considerations of utility. . . . At the present time they are all at peace, since they have been enslaved and are living in accordance with the commands of the Romans who captured them.”77 Similarly, Caesar praised them for their ability

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and eagerness to imitate the Romans: “They are a nation possessed of remarkable ingenuity, and extremely apt to copy and carry out anything suggested to them.”78 Their supposed eagerness to adapt to the Roman way of life was part of what made the Gauls great, according to Caesar and Strabo. As good colonial subjects, the Gauls became so fully Romanized that they purportedly forgot their own past, and even forgot their own language. As Strabo wrote: “[They] have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more. And most of them have become Latins, and they have received the Romans as colonists, so that they are not far from being all Romans. And the present jointly-settled cities, Pax Augusta in the Celtic country . . . manifest the change to the aforesaid civil modes of life.”79 Once the Gauls “received the Romans as colonists,” they abandoned their former life as “barbarians.” Gradually they formed cities and followed a more restrained, civilized way of life. After becoming sedentary, they turned to farming, and some even studied philosophy and eloquence. Strabo recounts that the Gauls in Marseilles, the Massiliotes, became more and more subdued as time went on, and instead of carrying on war have already turned to civic life and farming. . . . For all the men of culture turn to the art of speaking and the study of philosophy; so that the city, although a short time ago it was given over as merely a training school for the barbarians and was schooling the Galatae to be fond enough of the Greeks to write even their contracts in Greek, at the present time has attracted also the most notable of the Romans, if eager for knowledge, to go to school there instead of making their foreign sojourn at Athens. . . . Seeing these men and at the same time living at peace, the Galatae are glad to adapt their leisure to such modes of life.80 Over time, the Gauls became Romans. Describing one group of Gauls, the Cavari, Strabo wrote: “The name of the Cavari prevails, and people are already calling by that name all the barbarians in that part of the country—no, they are no longer barbarians, but are, for the most part, transformed to the type of the Romans, both in their speech and in their modes of living, and some of them in their civic life as well.”81 Given that Strabo found the Gauls “transformed to the type of the Romans” in the Augustan Age, shortly after the conquest, H. D. Rankin concluded that the Gauls did in fact assimilate very rapidly into Roman culture.82

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Moreover, the Gauls assimilated voluntarily and happily, at least according to many Greek and Roman accounts. These colonial subjects identified with their Roman colonizers because they perceived the benefits of Roman rule. Far from feeling oppressed, the Gauls supposedly felt happy and expressed gratitude, not resentment. As Strabo wrote, “Along with the happy lot of their country, the qualities of both gentleness and civility have come . . . to the Celtic peoples.”83 The Gauls were “glad to adapt their leisure to [the Roman] modes of life.”84 As a result, their quality of life improved vastly. Strabo praised the Gauls for being intelligent enough to welcome the Romans with open arms. The Romans saw themselves as liberators, freeing the barbarians from their ignorance. Motivated by love and generosity, the Romans saw themselves not as usurpers or conquerors but as friends, nurturing the less fortunate and treating them like family. These “friends” saw their colonizing mission as so soft that it merged with their civilizing mission and could not be reduced to a power dynamic of military conquest. The Romans wanted to believe that they did not impose their will on barbarians through brute force. The Gauls voluntarily chose Roman rule as a form of self-improvement. In viewing themselves as the Gauls’ liberators, the Romans used an interpretive lens that reflected their own responses to the Greeks. Militarily, the Romans had colonized the Greeks, but culturally they reversed the power relationship. Seeing the Greeks as possessing a superior civilization, the Romans looked to them as liberators who held up the torch of enlightenment. Fearing that they themselves were barbarians, these self-perceived inferiors were grateful to the Greeks for freeing them from their ignorance. Imposing a cultural colonization on themselves, the Romans voluntarily strapped on chains that made the Greeks their cultural masters. Cicero expressed gratitude toward the Greeks for having “rescued us from barbarism.” As he wrote to his brother, “I shall not be ashamed to assert that I am indebted for whatever I have accomplished to the arts and studies transmitted to us in the records and philosophic teachings of Greece. . . . We owe a special debt to that race of men, and that is, among those very people whose precepts have rescued us from barbarism, to be the willing exponents of the lessons we have learnt from them.”85 Cicero wanted the Romans to pass on to others the same wonderful gift of civilization that the Greeks had given to them. He advised his brother on how to rule by passing on this gift: “Treat . . . as friends those whom the Senate and people of Rome have committed and entrusted to your honor and authority, protect . . . them in every way possible. . . . Why, if fate had given

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you authority over the Africans or the Spaniards or the Gauls, uncouth and barbarous nations, you would still owe it to your humanitas to be concerned about their comforts, needs and security.”86 Cicero, like many other Romans, felt that Rome’s duty was to help all peoples reach their potential as members of the human race. In short, the Roman colonizing strategy encouraged the Gauls to identify with the Romans and slip into an “us” position with them. By fusing the civilizing mission and the colonizing mission, the Roman strategy blurred the “us-them” boundary, and induced the colonized to identify with the colonizer. In fact, however, this discourse did not convey the complexity of the Roman-Gaul encounter. As Greg Woolf has pointed out, the concept of “Romanization” is erroneous, for several reasons. First, it presupposes that there was a preexisting notion of a pure Roman culture. But actually “there was no standard Roman civilization against which provincial cultures might be measured. The city of Rome was a cultural melting pot and Italy experienced similar changes to the provinces.” Second, Romanization did not “culminate in a cultural uniformity throughout an empire.”87 Third, this oversimplified discourse did not account for a high level of Gallic resistance. Nevertheless, the idealized Roman discourse prevailed—and on a grand scale. So much so that long after the Roman Empire had disappeared, its supposedly friendly ghosts still lived on, taking up residence inside France’s collective psyche. When early modern French intellectuals looked back on their own past, they identified to a large degree with the Romans against the earlier, independent Gauls. Writing at the very end of the seventeenth century, Charles Rollin, a highly distinguished historian and educator, praised the Roman colonial strategy. He lauded its policy of colonizing through love, and blurring the “us-them” distinction. Unlike most other colonizers, the Romans did not treat “the vanquished as enemies according to the custom of other conquerors, by exterminating them, stripping them of freedom and reducing them to servitude, or in forcing them, by the harshness of oppression, to hate their new government.”88 On the contrary, Rollin thought they treated the Gauls with love, hoping to include them, not subjugate them. The Roman strategy “viewed them as natural subjects, [and] made them live with them in Rome, bestowed upon them all the privileges of previous citizens, adopted their holidays and sacrifices, granted them access to all civil and military employment without a second thought; and in showing them all the advantages of the State’s beneficence, Rome attached them to itself by such powerful and

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voluntary bonds, that they were never tempted to break them.”89 Because the Romans colonized through love, they were soon loved. The Roman general became a “protector” to the Gauls, much like a father who “treat[ed] them all like . . . his children.”90 The Roman general “pleaded their cause in the senate, protected their rights and interests,”91 and included the transformed Gauls as naturalized Roman citizens. According to Rollin, this strategy sought to dissolve the initial Gaul-Roman boundaries by giving the Gauls “all the rights” of the Roman-born and “admitted [some of them] into state government,” thus encouraging them to accept Roman beliefs and values. The “Gauls were full of consulary families,” and they fulfilled “civil and military appointments.”92 The Romans promised that the “us-them” boundary would be stretched to include the Gauls, “without almost no difference between them and their vanquishers.”93 The Roman colonial strategy was supposedly open and inclusive, erasing the initial Rome-Gaul distinction. Once the colonized Gauls were properly educated and transformed by the Roman civitas, they became members of the Roman community. The Romans’ seductive culture was an instrument of colonial domination: it would stimulate in the Gauls a love for their colonizer, inducing the colonized to imitate the colonizer/civilizer voluntarily, hoping their conqueror’s cultural superiority would rub off on them. The Gauls’ imitation of the Romans would set in motion a seemingly natural Romanization or civilizing process. Roman eloquence was essential to this goal: it was “the art and ability to win [the Gauls’] minds,” enticing them to willingly identify with the colonizer and see them as liberators, not conquerors, and “attach [the Gauls] to [Rome’s] power, to its advantages and glory.”94 Lured into fully associating themselves with Roman prestige and power, the Gauls no longer claimed a separate identity. The Romans thus dissolved the “us-them” barrier by making both the colonizer and the colonized forget the divide separating them. Admiring this approach, Rollin observed that the colonizer “forgot its status as a vanquisher,” and the colonized forgot that they were ever colonized: “one did not see any freed slave who did not prefer this new country to his native land and his family.”95 To prefer the new country meant that the colonized forgot their old habits and customs. The Gauls became attached to the Romans “by bonds so powerful and voluntary that they were never tempted to break them,” continued Rollin.96 The Romans treated the Gauls as if they “were born and sprang from the earth,” and thus the colonized forgot their first birth.97 And so did

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posterity in France looking back on the Romanized Gauls. Tacitus is an example of this phenomenon. As H. D. Rankin points out, it was widely believed that Tacitus was a Gaul, born in Narbonese or Cisalpine Gaul, who became so much like a Roman that he is often thought of as Roman. But his origins were difficult to prove.98 Forgetting thus played a key role in the Romans’ colonizing/civilizing mission. The colonized identified with the colonizer, forgetting the original power dynamic by viewing their masters as civilizers and liberators.

The “Ancients” Win the Memory War The ancients won the memory war. The officially accepted story of France has relegated the colonized past of its nation’s ancestors to a prehistory. French history began when the Gauls were already subject to the Romans’ civilizing mission and were benefitting from it. In this version, the Gauls were dutiful subjects, as were their French descendants. Or rather, the Gauls were not colonial subjects but successors, transformed from a “them” into an “us” with their former masters, becoming their heirs and inheriting the same role as their masters.99 The outcome of the memory war over the two Gauls had three decisive consequences for French literary and cultural history. First, it grounded the disjunction between the nation’s own cultural and colonial stories. The cultural story framed the Roman colonization of Gaul as a civilizing mission. This frame obscured what was true for the Romans: they acknowledged that their colonizing and civilizing missions were two sides of the same phenomenon. The French cultured elite, however, needed to separate them to preserve their own dignity and pride. In severing the role of the Romans as civilizers from their role as colonizers, the French elite sought to avoid the problems of imitating and identifying with colonizers who had oppressed them. Given the glory and greatness of Rome, it is not surprising that the French church, state, and “artisans of glory” chose to identify with it rather than against it. In so doing, the ancients replaced the story of resentment against Roman domination with the story of love and of gratitude for the gift of civilization. This winning narrative thus illustrates what the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o observed centuries later in Decolonizing the Mind (1986): “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues” and telling the colonizer’s story as one’s own.100

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Second, since the French, as the colonized, separated out in their own history the Roman colonizing and civilizing missions in Gaul, they felt justified and invested in maintaining the same distinction when they became colonizers, harnessing their version of Roman imperialism for their own aggrandizing agenda. In the seventeenth century, the French Church and State sought to forget the colonizing counterpart to their civilizing/evangelizing missions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the French state adapted a version of this same discourse in which it imagined the nation was holding up the torch of enlightenment for the Asians and Africans. In so doing, the French could preserve their dignity as colonizers by framing their expansionist ventures in a glorious, liberating light, worthy of la grandeur de la France. The third consequence of the memory war was that because the nation’s winning, glorious narrative has dominated for so long, presenting its partial story as the whole story, it now becomes difficult to dislodge it and show that its alternative narrative still mattered. But as the next chapter will develop, the buried memory war was still of import because the underlying tension between the two competing narratives was never fully resolved. Since decolonization is impossible as long as the fact of colonization does not get acknowledged, the unresolved tensions about the nation’s colonized past continued to haunt the debates over imitation throughout the seventeenth century, shaping its meanings and giving it a disproportionately strong and heated charge. The enduring conflict of this foundational memory war runs so deep that this controversy is, surprisingly, still alive today, albeit in a different form, as this book’s conclusion will explore.

chapter 2

The Return of the Submerged Story About France’s Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation

One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly in the trains of reasoning. —Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Were the Greco-Romans an “us” or a “them”? This question was central to the memory war about how French history would be constructed, as we saw in Chapter 1. The ancients won this foundational conflict of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, and thus French history was considered to have begun with the Romans as an “us” who helped civilize the Gauls. The effects of this memory war have been long lasting, because the nation’s dominant narrative aligned France with the Ancient Romans. In so doing, this narrative forced underground the competing alternative, which highlighted the nation’s colonized past. In this losing version, the Romans were a “them”—colonizers and invaders who deprecated the Gauls as barbarians. The narrative about France’s colonized past did not disappear, however, even if the national memory bank excluded it. Shards of it remained. Because any representation of history is always partial, historiographers have to 54

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eliminate large portions to make it cohesive and intelligible, noted Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History. But whatever one excludes and “holds to be irrelevant . . . comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies,” he astutely observed.1 This chapter will show how the nation’s excluded history about its colonized past came back indirectly, “despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies.” It returned in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation and about the nation’s world of letters. However, when this memory resurfaced, it did not return in a rational or coherent manner. Rather, it erupted in a disguised, fragmentary form that produced strange inconsistencies in texts that discussed the nation’s past. These fragments had a strange, inbetween status. They left enough traces to prevent the nation’s colonized past from being completely erased. But those traces were relatively weak, so they never cohered into a sustained, fully defined logical construct. Had they been stronger, the traces would have been easier to combat. It was as if the cultured elite were boxing with shadows. These shadows were what gave the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns its strange and amorphous power. Having explored the Quarrel’s foundational battle as a memory war in the previous chapter, let us now consider how the remnants of that battle erupted in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation. I contend that what was really at stake in these debates was a quarrel over decolonization.

Defending the French Language and French Culture The latent memory of France’s colonized past resurfaced in a special class of writing known as the “defense.” This genre was the most important site for the nation’s struggle to decolonize from the Ancients. While the defense was a mode of discourse that had many different purposes, my discussion will focus on the humanist-educated elite’s struggles to defend the vernacular and the nation’s own world of letters.2 Du Bellay wrote the most important and famous of the defenses, La défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). He was hardly alone, however. Hundreds of writers rallied round this same cause in the early modern era, although they often did not use the word “defense” in their titles. For example, the French Academy was founded in 1634 as a defensive structure: its primary mission was to defend the nation’s world of letters.3 To cite another example, Dominique Bouhours defended the French language

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in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671). France’s world of letters was not the only thing that needed a defense. Estienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France was a “historical defense and illustration of the French nation,” as Danielle Trudeau has remarked.4 Pasquier sought to defend the nation’s independence in the political, religious, and literary domains. The defense thus was a vast and important category of writing. Yet the defense has received surprisingly little attention as a genre, with the notable exception of Margaret Ferguson’s excellent study.5 While examining the defenses, most scholars have zeroed in on the concept of imitation, concentrating largely on the formal or theoretical issues of mimesis.6 For the most part, scholars ignore or minimize the fact that imitation was frequently raised within the specific discursive context of the defense. As a result, the unstated assumption of most scholars is that imitation was charged with the role of helping the French elite to achieve its highest goal: becoming civilized. They have generally neglected what imitation was defending against. The genre of the defense, however, needs to be taken literally, since its distinctive mode of discourse profoundly shaped the dynamics of imitation and broadened its meanings. A defense looks downward to defend against something as well as looking upward to argue for something. In the context of the Quarrel, imitation was concerned with both. Its most well-known function was to enable French intellectuals to progress upward toward civilization by emulating Greek and Roman models. However, imitation had a second, counterbalancing function: to defend against regression into barbarism. Ferguson’s analysis illuminated the nature of the literary defense, showing how it followed structures similar to those of a psychological defense, as Freud would later develop it. She observed how Freud often used the concepts of defense and repression in overlapping ways. The goal of both, she argued, was to guard against two different kinds of danger. The first was an external danger that was real and very much in the present moment; the second was felt within the psyche from a remembered danger that was replaying an archaic, primitive drama. Often the sources of both dangers became conflated, with one substituting for the other. As for the danger present in early modern France, the state was struggling with many different issues, too numerous to elaborate here. Broadly speaking, the state wanted to develop and fortify its monarchical powers, and it was also preoccupied with the ongoing tension between Catholics and Protestants, which continued well after the Edict of Nantes, which officially

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ended the religious wars. Hélène Merlin-Kajman and Marc Fumaroli have described how the French language developed in the context of both struggles.7 Both scholars are mostly concerned with the positive ideals that the defenses were aiming at, whereas I am concerned with what these texts were defending against. Both scholars examine the explicit political and cultural contexts of the defense, whereas I wish to explore the unstated, archaic dramas that were buried beneath this genre’s surface. Jean Savaron’s defense, Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement des rois et de l’Etat (1611), for example, used the primitive scene of the Gauls’ struggle against the Romans as a backdrop for the Catholic-Protestant controversy. In 1610, Henri IV was assassinated, just twelve years after he had signed the Edict of Nantes. His death raised fears that old wounds could be opened. A year after the assassination, Savaron (1566–1622), a magistrate, advised the new king, Louis XIII, on how to deal with “the barbarousness which has slipped in amongst your subjects,” in his defense of the nation’s world of letters.8 Writing within the larger context of the Catholic League’s efforts to clamp down on Protestant heresy, Savaron used the image of two different Gauls to conjure up France’s internal conflicts: “Nothing as much as letters can be recommended to kings to harness the passionate spirit of the French and confine it within their duty: [letters] provide the opportunity to bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts, [and] we created public spaces for the exercise of letters. The Gallic Hercules surmounted the previously invincible passionate spirit of the Gauls, drawing them to him through golden chains of speech.”9 Savaron aligned France’s murderous rebels with the ferocity of the primitive Gauls, and he projected the image of a civilized, Romanized Gaul onto the forces of order that needed to prevail. He urged that the latter stamp out its barbaric counterpart in order to “bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts.”10 Like their Gallic ancestors in their earliest stage, the wild French dissidents had “the ferocity innate in French minds that was never tempered by the sweetness of letters.”11 The current heretics were like the precolonized Gauls: unruly beasts that needed taming. A Gallic Hercules would bridle their wildness through his eloquent speech. Savaron thus used the Roman colonial discourse with its conflict between the two Gauls as a frame for France’s internal religious and civil conflicts because it drew upon one of the most primitive and important of French dramas: the supposed barbarism of France’s Gallic past. This archaic story was still very much alive and gained in emotional force by virtue of being interwoven

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with other dramas in the French consciousness. Savaron’s use of the two Gauls suggested that he had largely internalized the Roman colonial discourse, favoring a civilized Gaul over a more independent but barbaric Gaul. The French elite’s defenses of their language and world of letters adopted a common defensive strategy; they placed the perceived danger out of range of consciousness.12 This strategy clearly worked, since the fear of barbarism has been eclipsed by the story of its opposite: the nation’s cultural greatness. But the threat never vanished completely; barbarism continued to haunt the collective psyche of the nation’s world of letters. The very fact that the defense became such a prevalent genre was itself significant. The defenses took on such a strong emotional charge because they struggled against the enduring effects of the nation’s submerged colonial past.

A Memory of Their Own The French defenses of their nation’s language and world of letters endeavored to respond to a key legacy of the nation’s colonized past: the lack of any written documents to record the Gauls’ history from their own perspective. Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) was a defense of the vernacular which addressed the feared perception that the Gauls were illiterate and thus barbaric. Tory anchored his defense in the troubling story of the Romans who, as part of their deceptive colonizing strategy, had maliciously stolen from the Gauls their favorable memory of their past. The Romans wrongly painted the Gauls as illiterate, he argued. France’s ancestors had already had a “working knowledge of reading and writing . . . long before Julius Caesar came to France.”13 However, their world of letters became vulnerable to a Roman theft because it was insufficiently developed. Their Roman conquerors could thus easily snuff it out and impose a cultural amnesia on the Gauls, “destroy[ing their] laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers.”14 These conquerors then substituted their own Romanized memories for those of the Gauls themselves, forcing the Gauls to celebrate Roman “victories and achievements . . . recorded in their own Latin letters.”15 Tory argued for developing the French language in this colonial context: to guard against another similar loss of the nation’s own memory. Having a history of their own meant that the Gauls/French would not have to look at themselves through the Greco-Roman portraits that cast them as the barbarian other. Du Bellay’s Défense was of course the most famous and important of all

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the defenses. Like Tory before him, Du Bellay situated his defense of the vernacular within the context of the Gauls’ colonized past. He began his defense by casting the Romans as an imperial, self-aggrandizing “them” who self-consciously stole the Gauls’ memory in a deceptive and calculating plot. Conjuring up the specter of the Gauls’ remote colonial history, Du Bellay recounted how the Romans had engaged in a psychic and cultural warfare to deprive the Gauls of their own memory of themselves: “The Romans’ envy [of the Gauls] caused them to plot a conspiracy against us and weaken, as far as they were able, our warlike glory, whose brilliance they could not tolerate. . . . Not only have they done us wrong thereby, but, to make us seem yet even more contemptible, they have called us brutal, cruel, and barbarous.”16 Without a memory of their own, the Gauls and their French descendants were forced into internalizing their former colonizers’ perceptions of them: The Romans called us Barbarians, seeing that in their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory, they sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject in comparison with them: principally the Gauls, from whom they suffered more shame and hurt than others. In this connection, reflecting often on why the Romans’ deeds are so celebrated throughout the world, nay, more highly preferred than those of all other nations taken together, I find no greater reason than this: that the Romans had a great multitude of writers so that most of their deeds . . . over many years, their ardour in battle . . . has been preserved entire until our times. On the contrary, the actions of other nations, especially the Gauls, before they fell into the power of the French, and the actions of the French themselves since they gave their name to the Gauls, have been so ill collected, that we have almost lost not only the glory of them, but even the memory of them. [my emphasis]17 The Roman plot against the Gauls prevented them and their French descendants from constructing an independent memory of their own past. A century later, France’s world of letters was still on the defensive. The French Academy was founded in 1634 largely to guard against a memory theft. Nicolas Faret provided a rationale for the Academy in his Projet de l’académie, pour servir de préface à ses statuts (1634) by first highlighting that the Gauls/ French were the victims of Greek and Roman colonial domination and not simply their heirs. Framing the Greco-Romans as jealous cultural imperialists,

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Faret argued that they had stolen the Gauls’ memory from them in a vicious power struggle. The Gauls had once established an empire so vast and feared that “for all time . . . [they] made themselves fearsome to the most celebrated Nations on earth, and their Name still reigns amongst several of them as a Trophy to their victories.”18 According to Faret, the Greeks and Romans were militarily inferior to the Gauls and felt dwarfed by them. So powerful were the Gauls that “our Reknown sometimes obscured that of the Greeks, and our Valor triumphed over the Greek People and their Provinces.”19 The Greeks and Romans, to compensate for their lack and give vent to their jealousy, shifted the battleground to their area of strength—the cultural arena. As masters of rhetoric, they marshaled words as important weapons in this war. They used their eloquence to alter how history represented the Gauls, reducing their stature for posterity. The Greeks, “with all their hate and artifice,” sought “to smother the truth [of the Gauls’ greatness] beneath [their] deceptive Histories.”20 Their linguistic weapons succeeded in distorting how history perceived their Gallic adversaries. As for the Romans, “it seems that [they] engaged with the Gauls only to slander them. Sometimes the Romans called them the most terrible and merciless of all Barbarians. Other times, they named the Gauls enormous and ferocious Giants, bloody Colossuses animated by furor alone and by the cruelty that they brought into the world, and often they sought to represent them as Monsters who were born only for the destruction of Cities and for the unhappiness of the human race.”21 Even though the Romans told outrageous lies, their crafty rhetoric made their falsities seem true. The truth itself did not matter; only the vraisemblable did. Roman rhetoric determined the perception of truth because the Romans presented their lies “with the most beautiful rhetorical flourishes.”22 Their eloquence convinced posterity that the Gauls were weak and barbaric. Eventually this slander was taken as the truth itself. The Greco-Roman narratives thus shaped how others defined the Gauls. So successful were the Greek and Roman slurs that the Gauls’ greatness was virtually forgotten, almost lost to history. As a result, France’s ancestors were erroneously viewed as barbarians. As victims (and heirs) of Roman rhetoric, Faret and other French intellectuals understood firsthand the power of language: its force could compensate for insufficient military might, making false perceptions pass as vraisemblable and as historical truth. Faret warned that while the French kings could use physical power to “make their name known and their power dreaded,” such force would be weak “without the help of the Sciences and Arts.” Had the Gauls possessed “the art of making the natural ardor of their conquests well

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known through their writings,” their glory would not have been erased from history. Because the Gauls did not have their own world of letters, they could not counteract Roman slander. Consequently “the luster of the Gauls’ reputation for greatness faded and [was] finally extinguished [by a reputation] for barbarism.”23 Faret insisted that an academy be founded to cultivate French works of eloquence because only this linguistic art could control how the French elite and their nation would be perceived by others, by themselves, and by posterity. In sum, France’s colonized past provides a larger context for understanding many of the defenses of the nation’s language and world of letters. The Roman theft of the Gauls’ memory of themselves lay at the root of the dilemma which trapped the French self-understanding within their former colonizers’ disdainful view of them. This dilemma thus motivated the state to institute an academy to ensure that France’s writers would possess a powerful language and world of letters capable of preserving their own memory from their own perspective. By cultivating their language and letters, the French nation would not suffer the same fate as the Gauls. The French Academy thus sought to liberate the nation from understanding itself through the denigrating lens of its former colonizers. Early modern France’s obsession with eloquence thus takes on a very different meaning within this colonial context which frames the Rome-Gaul story as a memory theft.

Internalizing the Threat of Barbarism The French defenses of their world of letters targeted another problem resulting from the Gauls’ loss of their own historical memory. Unable to construct an independent picture of their own past, the Gauls and their French descendants became trapped in a Romanized hall of mirrors that reflected back to them a demeaning portrait. The Romans, having smashed or stolen all evidence of the Gauls’ greatness, reduced the Gauls to one central image—that of the barbarian other. This image became elite France’s Achilles’ heel. Centuries later, when competitors wanted to scorn France, they taunted it with this image because the invective surrounding it was already charged with venom and could reopen old wounds. The fear of barbarism hung like a dark cloud over the sixteenth-century humanists’ efforts to shape and defend their own world of letters.24 Many outsiders accused the French of barbarism. The shrillest accusations came from

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the Italians, France’s chief rivals in a quest for political and cultural hegemony that dated back to the early part of the century and before. In 1507 François Tissard defended the French language and world of letters against the Italians’ charge of barbarism in an address to the students at the University of Paris. He formulated the issue by mimicking the snicker of a haughty Italian who taunted the French from the towering heights of his nation’s supposed cultural superiority: “So? . . . a good Frenchman hopes to pull his country out of barbarism and to prove its worthiness? . . . Do you [French] really hope to outshine those in our country [Italy], so famous, so eloquent, so polished? You who are barbaric and uncultivated? . . . Who are those people in nations beyond the mountains who have no knowledge of human letters, neither Latin nor Greek?”25 Adding to the Italians’ scorn of the French world of letters was a chorus of other Europeans. Erasmus, in De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio, devalued the French language by claiming that even a simple German boy could learn French in a few short months without much effort. He could do it “quite unconsciously while absorbed in other activities.” Moreover, French was “barbarous and irregular . . . [its] spelling does not agree with pronunciation, and [its] harsh sounds and accents . . . hardly fall within the realm of human speech.”26 The most serious and insidious accusation, however, came not from the outside but from the inside. Many French humanists themselves had internalized this charge of barbarism. When Tissard countered the Italians’ accusations of barbarism, he did so by accepting the belief that French was indeed barbaric. Conceding the current inferiority of France’s world of letters, his defense was based on the promise of a more glorious future. Speaking of the new path to greatness that was opening up in France, Tissard wrote: “To this enterprise is promised an easy and imminent success. Let us then work together.”27 He had internalized the perception that French was barbaric because he accepted the Greco-Roman definitions of barbarism and civilization. The Greco-Romans defined civilization as possessing a knowledge of their languages and their world of learning. Correspondingly, they defined barbarism in terms of its lack. What Tissard meant by “pull[ing] his country out of barbarism” was that the French elite should follow the same path as the Greeks and Romans, imitating their trajectory to narrow the gap separating them from their classical models. Like Tissard, many humanists agreed that French was barbaric and defective; their defense consisted in repairing the language. Conceding that French was deficient and in need of reform, Etienne Dolet, in La Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en une autre (1540), proposed that the French civilize

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their language and themselves so that “foreigners will no longer call us barbarians.”28 Du Bellay’s Défense explicitly addressed those French humanists who had internalized the accusation that the vernacular was indeed barbaric. The Roman memory theft caused the good memories of the Gauls’ deeds to fall into oblivion, forcing the French and their Gallic ancestors to adopt their former colonizers’ perceptions of them: “The Romans called us Barbarians, seeing that in their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory, they sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject in comparison with them.” Even though the Romans were dead, their power was so great that it transcended their graves. The ghosts of Romans past took up residence inside French souls and caused the French to keep alive the Roman disdain and turn it inward. It made the French themselves “view [their language] as barbarous and irregular, incapable of that elegance and fecundity which are in the Greek and Roman [language],” as Du Bellay put it.29 Thus many French humanists assumed, he wrote, that “our tongue is too vile and barbarous to deal with such lofty subjects as philosophy” and believed that French was “incapable of all good letters and erudition.”30 Du Bellay then added: “I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance and temerity of some of our fellow countrymen who, taking themselves for nothing less than Greeks or Romans, despise and reject with a stoic, haughty raised brow everything written in French. And I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opinion of some learned men, who think that our vulgar tongue is incapable of all good letters and erudition.”31 If many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries rejected “with a stoic, haughty raised brow” all that was written in French, where did their scorn come from? On what ground did these accusers stand? Clearly they stood not on a solid French ground but on one of an imagined alliance with the Ancients, at least a partial one. From these lofty heights, they saw their own language through the Ancients’ imagined perspective, which dwarfed their own stature as French. Many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries revealed such a self-deprecating stance. Guillaume Budé feared that his fellow countrymen were “unsuited to letters, in contrast to the Italians, whose sky and soil enabled even infants to wail with eloquence and poetry.”32 According to Guillaume du Vair, French eloquence “degenerates from Ancient Greek and Roman,” and “we do not have as many great masters and practitioners of eloquence as Greece and Rome.” He feared that French was inferior because of “the drought in our minds” and that there might be “a stain in us.”33 Nothing could repair this kind of lack. Internalizing the belief that their language was inferior, many members of the French humanist-educated elite suffered from the legacy of the nation’s

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colonized past. Barbarism became a label that stuck. To be sure, many of the elite argued that the label was not justified. Nevertheless, they still took this accusation seriously, as did Etienne Pasquier when he complained that “several Italian authors want to emblazon us with this title [of barbarian].”34 Many French lettrés unwittingly wore a semivisible letter B emblazoned across their foreheads: for centuries they continually provided defenses against this accusation of barbarism, while at the same time indulging in grandiose rhetoric of greatness and genius. More than a hundred years later, the specter of France’s colonized past as a nation of barbarians still hovered over the educated elite’s struggle to defend their language and cultural power. In 1671 Dominique Bouhours penned one of the most popular and successful defenses in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.35 Like Du Bellay, Bouhours defended the French language and French culture against the legacy of the Roman colonization of Gaul. True, this past did not weigh as heavily over Bouhours as it did over his predecessors. But the effects of this past were still evident in the fact that France’s cultured elite continued to value and speak their former colonizer’s language. The Romans had forced their language upon the Gauls as an instrument of domination: “As soon as the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls, the Roman language began to be used there, either out of the complaisance of the conquered, or because it was necessary and in their best interest; be it because they were subjects who had no access to their masters without some fluency in Latin, or be it because the Roman decrees were all written in Latin. Little by little Latin gained ground and the Romans imposed the yoke of their language, along with servitude, upon the conquered, as Saint Augustine writes.”36 Latin, far from being a neutral language of greatness, also contained the mark of the Gauls’ subjection to their colonial masters. To value the vernacular was a political act: to decolonize the French mind from foreign rule. Viewing the Romans as adversaries, Bouhours situated his defense within a curious master-slave discourse, arguing that French was not a “slave” to Latin. He boasted that French, liberated from the stranglehold the Romans exerted over it, had declared its freedom, whereas Spanish and Italian had not rid themselves of all Latin endings.37 Understanding that the best defense is a good offense, he attacked these other languages, accusing them of still remaining yoked to the Romans: “They are like slaves who always carry the mark and the livery of their master.”38 Fortunately the French had escaped such bondage; “rather,” wrote Bouhours, “we are people

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who enjoy total liberty. By removing this evident resemblance that other languages have with Latin, we have made a language for ourselves that has been created by a free people rather than born into slavery.”39 Because the Romans adopted a strategy that colonized the Gauls through cultural imperialism, the status of Roman culture within France was highly freighted; it was part of a colonial bond that many intellectuals, mostly moderns, sought to break. The development of the French language became the mark of France’s independence from Ancient Rome, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman too has argued.40 Because Latin symbolized a problematic past, it is important to specify which version of Latin Bouhours had in mind. There were two basic kinds, as the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini reminds us.41 The first was a high, classical Latin, the language of Virgil and Cicero. The second was a more popular, vulgar version of the streets that evolved out of a political colonization and the mass infusion of different cultures, with the mixing of different populations. Bouhours had in mind the vulgar form that resulted from the Gauls’ history as a colonized people. After Bouhours’ character Eugène insisted that French was “created by a free people rather than born into slavery,” Ariste replied that such talk was a mask to hide the lowly origins of French: “We have acted like those men of fortune, who hide to others and to themselves who they are by disguising their family name, to escape reproach due to their lowly birth.” He briefly recounted the language’s evolution, beginning when the Gauls were “the vanquished” or “the subjects” and “the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls.” The Gauls, “unable to make themselves agreeable to the victors except in speaking their language,” began to speak Latin more and more. Over time the Gauls forgot their own language, or rather “they corrupted it, mixing it with that of the Romans. Unable to completely rid themselves of their own, nor completely learn the other, they confused the two; from this confusion there resulted I do not know what kind of jargon which they called Roman, to distinguish it from Latin.” Then when the Franks drove the Romans out of Gaul, they added more words to this mixture; “rather than abolish this barbaric language, they accommodated themselves to it” and imposed “the yoke of their language on the vanquished nations along with that of servitude.”42 The Franks, to “mark that they were the masters,” inserted many German words into “this Gallic or rustic Latin, as some have called it.” And then came the Goths, the Bourguignons, the Huns, and the Vandals, all of whom “added several terms to the language of the countries where

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they established themselves.”43 As a result, French “was, in its origin, only a miserable jargon, half-Gallic, half-Latin, and half-teutonic.” Ariste call this mixed origin “a horrible monster.” He added that “this monster lasted a long time, the linguistic barbarism having survived for entire centuries, along with its barbaric customs.”44 This mixed heritage propelled Bouhours to insist upon purifying and cleansing the language of its “garbage” (“ordures”). Purifying the language meant liberating it from its colonial past by erasing the traces of its former subjection to invaders and forgetting that it had ever occurred. While Bouhours struggled here against Vulgar Latin, the status of classical Latin still remained an issue. It was equally problematic, for reasons I address in chapter 6. Thus far, my goal has been to show how the French elite defended their own world of letters within the context of their struggle to transcend the nation’s colonized past. However, I am not suggesting that this vision of the past came into a sharp or consistent focus. Rather, it appeared through shards. The fragmented awareness of this colonized past existed in tension with the dominant narrative that sought to deny it and bury this past as no longer relevant, as if it had never really happened. Trapped within this in-between state, never fully articulating the significance of this colonized past and never fully able to extirpate its traces, the French elite were still haunted by its remnants. Thus the elite vacillated between two competing narratives about the Gauls/French relation to the Romans. Tunisian writer Albert Memmi has illuminated a similar tension for the colonized of modern Tunisia in 1957. He described how the colonized experienced themselves and the world through two conflicting psychic and cultural realms, through the opposing lens of both the colonizer and the colonized in his text, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Certainly the early modern humanist-educated elite suffered from a similar double vision. They vacillated between seeing themselves through their own eyes and through the imagined perspective of their former colonizers. This vacillation itself was a legacy of the specific nature of the Romans’ colonial strategy, which used their cultural force to blur the “us-them” boundaries. To be sure, all colonizers strive to have the colonized internalize their values and thought structures. However, the Roman strategy of a cultural assimilation fostered this internalization to a particularly high degree by presenting themselves as mentors, and offering the gift of civilization. This strategy sought to catch the colonized off guard so they would identify their interests with those of the colonizer. This strategy was largely effective.

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The Vicious Circle of Imitation That the French elite should have internalized the threat of barbarism is not surprising, as this danger was built into the Greco-Roman thought structures that they were imitating. Many Greco-Roman beliefs and values were based on a hierarchical, colonial mentality that made imitation or any true alliance virtually impossible. The Ancient World’s underlying ideology did not allow any space on its throne of greatness for the French, and implicitly pushed them off it. Because the Ancients were long since dead, they obviously did not personally and literally reject the French as partners or heirs. But this rejection was embedded in the underlying assumptions of the Greco-Roman thought structures. These modes of thought disrupted the French myths of continuity and alliance, casting the French elite into the position of outsiders, beyond the family circle. Many Greek and Roman thought structures thrust imitators such as the French so far outside the family fold that they were not even sons a few notches below their fathers; they were simply not considered family at all. Rather, they were deficient beings, barbarians. Such thought structures did not really allow the French access to the pinnacle they aspired to. Imitating the Ancients thus led to a vicious circle, reinforcing the elite’s initial fear of barbarism. Both Greek and Roman modes of thought were hostile to any imitators. The Greek view of nature and history placed non-Greeks in a perpetual position of inferiority. As Hesiod, Plato, and Polybius articulated these concepts, nature was degenerative. Nature’s decline meant that history was headed downhill and did not provide the French a level playing field with the Ancients. No matter how well the French imitated the Ancients, they would never come close to their lofty models because the future was always already slanted downward. The French elite’s task of bearing the Ancients’ load was as difficult and futile as Sisyphus’s. Many Romans, like Lucretius, adopted a similar view of nature and history, even though it meant that they, who came after the Greeks, were lower down in the hierarchy of being. France, by extension, was of even lesser stature. Thus, French imitators were diminished by both Greek and the Roman sources. The concept of the barbarian, borrowed from Greek thought, coupled with the idea of the degeneration of nature, also troubled the myth of a French continuity or alignment with the Ancients, making their models seem inimitable. In his Défense, Du Bellay defined the term “barbarian” by observing that it came from a Greek word rooted in the specificity of the Greek

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language. Concerning “the meaning of this word barbarous: in antiquity they were called barbarous who spoke Greek badly. For as foreigners coming to Athens attempted to speak Greek, they often fell into this absurd sound Barbaras [βάρβαρος]”45 Similarly, more than a century later Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) too defined “barbarian” as rooted in the Greek language: “Foreigners, when they came to Greece, stuttered, spoke crudely.”46 Barbaros was an onomatopoeia, evoking the babbling, inarticulate sounds of the person who could not speak Greek correctly. By extension, the term “barbarian” designated all those who were not-Greek. The Greek tongue was central to the Greeks’ definition of “barbarian” because language provided the foundation upon which all of Greek culture and identity was constructed, as Edith Hall and Anthony Pagden have discussed.47 The outsiders’ incorrect use of Greek designated more than a simple linguistic deficiency. It meant they could not achieve right reason. Without the Greek language, with its right reason, outsiders did not have the proper qualities to form or be included in the community, the polis. Although outsiders physically resembled humans, they were not fully human because they dwelled beyond the boundaries of the polis. Positioned on the outside, they had no knowledge of virtue, nor could they share in human society’s highest goals. Not recognizing the force of the bonds holding humans together, they were creatures for whom “the language of social exchange was devoid of meaning,” as Pagden puts it.48 Thus, while “barbarian” referred first to language and non-Greek speakers, it came to mean, by extension, those who were not fully rational or human. Many Greek writers grafted the human/nonhuman distinction onto the Greek/not-Greek opposition.49 Du Bellay resented the implication of nonhuman, complaining: “Afterwards the Greeks transferred this term [barbarian] to brutal and cruel customs, calling all nations but Greece barbarous.”50 A century later, Furetière’s dictionary definition of the term criticized the Greek/ non-Greek opposition: “The Greeks called Barbarians . . . all those who were not from their country,”51 because of Greece’s disdain for non-Greek nations. The Greek/barbarian binary opposition did not accord France’s humanist-educated elite a stable place within its frame. The French elite were literally not Greek-speaking, nor were they Greek. And yet, of course, they did not want to see themselves as barbarians. Greek culture, unlike its Roman counterpart, had no middle term or in-between state. It defined the “us” position so narrowly that not even the Romans quite fitted in. As Du Bellay noted, the Romans did not quite measure up; they enriched their language “almost the equal of Greek.”52 The Romans occupied a status of “almost but not quite”

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Greek, to transpose Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase,53 making them feel culturally inferior. By extension, the French were even lower down in that imagined hierarchy. The Greek understanding of the barbarian came out of a binary thought structure that offered no solid place for the French—at least not literally in its original form. The French elite could not legitimately occupy the “us” slot alongside the Greeks, since these proclaimed “fathers” would have probably derided them as poor imitators had they still been alive.54 Rooted in the specificity of the Greek language, the concept of the barbarian could not be easily transferred to the French language, thus pushing France outside the circle of a desired “us-ness” with the Greeks. The Greek linguistic divide thus reflected the dominant Greek worldview, which imposed strong “us-them” boundaries that did not readily welcome outsiders. Its boundaries reflected a highly polarized world to protect the carefully ordered political structures of (Greek) reason from the wildness of barbaric spaces beyond. Because its boundaries were not particularly elastic or fluid, foreigners were largely fixed in their position outside the polis. Barbarians could not easily acquire right reason or become civilized enough to merit inclusion.55 Despite this chasm that potentially threatened France’s continuity with the Ancients, many intellectuals still transformed or “translated” the key concepts of Greek thought into their own world of thought. Many seventeenthcentury writers interpreted the term “barbarian” figuratively, seeing themselves as united with the Greeks in a fundamental sameness so that they could substitute themselves on the Greek pedestal. The French Academy dictionary of 1694 defined the term “barbarian” such that the French occupied the dominant, civilized “us” slot in the “us-them” divide: “Barbaric: A language which has no relation to ours, or which is rude and shocks our ear” (my emphasis).56 Similarly, Furetière defined the barbarian as non-French. “Barbarian: Foreigner who is from a country which is very far, sauvage, badly polished, cruel and who has manners very different from ours” (my emphasis).57 French intellectuals of the seventeenth-century world of letters became obsessed with their own language, imitating the Greek emphasis on language. To speak French well meant being, like the Greeks, “not barbarian.” Frenchness and purity came to be defined negatively as “not barbarian.” Vaugelas wrote that “one can commit a barbarism . . . in speaking a word which is not at all French.” To speak French purely “one has only to avoid barbarisms.”58 Similarly, Furetière clarified his definition of “diction” by adding: “This diction is not French, but barbaric.”59 However, as much as the French humanist-educated elite sought

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to align themselves with the Greeks in the “us” position, the Greek pedestal was a narrow space that did not permit the French to share it. If the French elite imagined they got one foot up on it, the other foot was left dangling, always waiting and hoping to gain a firm footing there. Unable to fit stably on the pedestal, the French elite kept falling out of alignment with the Greeks and into the “barbarian” slot. In sum, the dominant strain of Greek thought did not really accommodate imitation. The diachronic notion of degeneration and the synchronic notion of the barbarian, if understood literally, doomed the French aspiration of kinship to failure. The Romans did not fit on the Greek pedestal either. They lived in the shadow of the Greek giants. The Roman-Greek dynamic presented a different version of the vicious circle that the French elite also fell into. The Romans were obsessed by the fear of being barbarians, culturally inferior to the Greeks, as several classicists have argued.60 This Roman fear was reflected in its key founding myth from Virgil’s Aeneid. After the Greeks had sacked Troy, Aeneas left with his father and settled in the land of the Latins. As both Rémi Brague and Richard Waswo have described it, to be Roman was to be rooted in the experience of exile, separated from one’s first land and transplanted to a new one. There, one began anew out of the ashes of the old.61 Rome’s myth of its Trojan origin portrayed itself as derivative, and inferior to its sources. Thus Rome’s true home was located in an elsewhere, a source that it could never fully possess or ever fully make its own because it was both foreign and located in an unobtainable past. Imitating the Greeks only aggravated the Roman fears of inferiority. The Romans thus situated themselves in a slippery middle space in between Hellenism and barbarism, as Brague has characterized it. To be Roman “is to have above oneself a classicism to imitate and below a barbarism to subdue. . . . It is to perceive oneself as Greek with regard to that which is barbaric, but also as barbaric with regard to that which is Greek. It is to know that what one transmits, one does not hold in oneself, and that one only possesses it with great difficulty, in a fragile and provisional way.”62 Thus, when the French cultured elite were imitating the Romans, they were repeating the Roman fear of being “barbaric with regard to that which is Greek.” Like their Roman models, the French elite were trapped between a form of Hellenism and barbarism. In sum, as models the Romans presented a key problem. Since the Romans felt culturally inferior to the Greeks, what the French imitators were copying was the Roman fear of being barbaric in relation to the Greeks. France’s inheritance from the Greeks and the Romans was thus a double liability and a double bind. To imitate either would not really help the French

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elite to defend themselves effectively against the legacy of their colonized past, since both models led into versions of a vicious circle. The French elite’s effort to rid themselves of the label “barbarian” only caused that glue to thicken. In its most basic structure, the vicious circle was about the struggle between similarity and difference, between civilization and barbarism. The French were in fact very different from the Ancients and feared that their differences signified that they were actually barbaric. Seeking to erase these differences, the French elite clung all the more doggedly to the Ancients, imitating them and celebrating myths of similarity with them, as if they were all kin. However, the thought structures the elite imitated reminded them of their differences, casting them out into the cold and leaving them to wonder if they could ever measure up. This cycle would then perpetuate itself without end. Imitation became a problem in itself because the underlying beliefs, values, and assumptions of the models they were imitating offered the French no stable home within them. In summary, then, by reframing the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, we see how the genre of the defense and its obsession with imitation need to be understood within the larger context of France’s submerged history about the Greco-Roman colonization of Gaul. Imitation acquires more complex and different meanings depending upon the imitator’s imagined relation to its models. To the extent that the imitator views the model as an “us,” whose basic interests and ideals are similar, imitation is not necessarily problematic, because it serves as a civilizing process. But to the extent that the imitator views the model as a “them,” especially a colonizer once bent on subjugation, imitation becomes fraught with great danger. This mimetic dynamic is even more perilous when the imitator forgets that the model was a colonizer and insists on a fundamental sameness between imitator and model despite their obvious underlying differences. This chapter has brought out the latter scenario, where imitation risks trapping the imitator in a vicious circle: what the French were copying were thought structures that were implicitly hostile to them as imitators, continually relegating them to the position of the outsider, the barbarian other. How could the French elite escape this vicious circle and cultivate an independent, dignified French world of letters to ground their emerging cultural identity? This question was central to the Quarrel and to the elite’s struggle to decolonize the nation from the Ancients and escape their influence. I examine three different proposed escape routes in chapters 6 to 8. Each of those pathways, however, involves a triangulated journey, since France situated itself

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between both the New World and the Ancient World. The Quarrel’s frame, I contend, thus needs to be expanded to include not simply the French decolonization from the Ancient World but also the French colonization of the New World, as chapter 5 discusses. But before exploring these triangulated routes, I need to address how the New World entered into the French imagination and how the reading French public imagined their colonial relation to the Amerindian barbarian. In chapter 3, I show how the information about the Americas became so widespread that the New World constituted an important pole opposite to that of the Ancient World. In chapter 4, I discuss France’s assimilationist stance toward the Amerindians: were they an “us” or a “them”?

P a r t II

France’s Colonial Relation to the New World

chapter 3

Relating the New World Back to France The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage

The Popular Success of the Relations de Voyage Because colonization has been excluded from the paradigm of France’s cultural self-understanding, one might reasonably conclude that the seventeenthcentury French reading public was kept in the dark about its own policy of assimilation. Logically speaking, the nation’s colonial contact with sauvages in the New World could have been kept entirely secret because it took place on the far side of the Atlantic. After all, as Marc Lescarbot put it in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, the two nations were “separated . . . by a sea so wide that men have apparently never had either the ability or the daring to cross it to discover new lands until these last centuries.”1 Given this distance, one might assume that the sauvage was consigned to the margins of French thought. But in fact quite the opposite occurred. The French church and state aggressively diffused information about the nation’s colonial contact with the New World, eager to make the reading public aware of what was happening in remote lands.2 The relations de voyage were pivotal texts in bringing the New World sauvage into the French reading public’s imagination. This chapter examines the relation de voyage as a genre, emphasizing its relational goal of bringing news about the colonial encounter back home to the motherland. In showing how the French reading public was aware of the nation’s colonial endeavors, the chapter grounds this book’s overarching argument that the nation’s colonial 75

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discourse was finely interwoven with its cultural debates, and helped shape France’s emerging cultural self-understanding. Moreover, this chapter helps ground my claim that the New World constituted an important pole in opposition to the Ancient World. The relations de voyage were relational, in the religious sense of religare, with a Latin root meaning to fasten or tie together.3 A relation can be a report about events as disparate as wars, theatrical productions, or conversations. But Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defined the relation primarily as travel reports.4 Furetière observed that more than thirteen hundred relations about travel were in print by the late seventeenth century.5 Hundreds described the New World, although the bulk of them were devoted to other parts of the world. While many writers entitled their travel reports relations, others simply called them “histories” or “voyages,” as in the history of a mission or of a voyage.6 France’s relations de voyage were expressly designed to capture the reading public’s imagination and became widely diffused among the cultivated elite. The relations offered a developed narrative style, with detailed portraits of the Native Americans’ psychology and sociocultural customs. These reports often sketched scenes that read like a novel, with human interest stories that gave a human face to the other, alive with dialogue, character development, and action. The story about the Frenchman who pursued a Native American woman in marriage that I mentioned in the introductory chapter exemplifies one of the most sophisticated narratives. The readability of the French relation differentiated it from its counterparts in England, Spain, and Holland, which were not generally written for a wide, general public. Thus, several centuries later when Thoreau wanted to read about life in the wilderness, he turned to France’s Jesuit Relations rather than to the relations of his own British tradition, as Gordon Sayre has noted.7 The British travel accounts were written in a dry, factual, list-like reporting style, focusing on information about the land, geography, and agricultural resources. The Spanish accounts were written for administrators and were narrowly focused on technical issues of management and resources. The French relations succeeded in reaching a wide audience. They took France’s reading public by storm, becoming more popular than novels, according to Jean Chapelain, a member of the French Academy, who had observed that travel accounts held the French imagination captive and were all the rage. In 1663, he noted: “Our nation has changed its reading tastes and instead of novels which have fallen out of favor with La Calprenède, travel narratives

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have become so prized that they are now very popular at court and in the city.”8 The relations stirred up such great interest that some were occasionally excerpted in the newspaper Mercure François. Others were compiled into anthologies. For example, in 1674, voyager Henri Justel compiled a Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en Amérique qui n’ont point este encore publiez. He prefaced this anthology with the statement that “the current taste for Relations and Voyages has become so widespread” that some information about Africa and America is “shared by almost all Europeans in even the smallest detail.”9 In short, these popular texts stimulated the reading public’s awareness of France’s colonial explorations and encounters. The relations were so popular in France that they nourished other genres of writing. If the relation cultivated novelistic features of plot, character development, and dialogue, the French novel in turn borrowed many features from the relation. A good case could made for seeing the novel as emerging, in part, from the relation. Many novels framed their narratives as relations, as did Denis Vairasse’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1672), which began with the narrator’s observation: “I took an incredible pleasure in reading the books about Travel, the relations about foreign countries and all that has been said about the new discoveries.”10 The narrator then described how, contrary to his parents’ wishes, he traveled to the New World. On his voyage back, he met a severely wounded Captain Siden who had lived there for fifteen years. The Captain recounted the tales of his adventures in the form of a relation, which constitutes the novel’s story. If some novels imitated the relations, Descartes’ Discours de la méthode reads like a travel narrative.11 Descartes created the persona of a wandering explorer of truth who learns more from travel than from books written by “a man of letters in his private study, concerned with speculations that have no impact on the real world.” Rather than accept theoretical truths, Descartes’ narrator prefers “to look at no science other than the one that can be found in the great book of the world.”12 In the text, Descartes’ thought process is motivated by the diversity of customs found in other nations, which seems inspired by the relations as a genre. The relations influenced many other different forms of writing. For example, in 1609, a French magistrate, Pierre de Lancre, had presided over the most important witchcraft trial of the century in the Labourd region. Afterward, he wrote a text, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, to understand why this French region near Spain supposedly had more witches than any other part of the country. He framed this text as a relation, as if he

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were traveling to a foreign land and describing its manners, traditions, beliefs, and daily life in a way that corresponded to the relations of foreign lands and peoples.13 The relations also helped shape another form of writing—the dictionary. They served as one of Furetière’s major sources, enabling him to name and conjure up in considerable detail the world of the other in his Dictionnaire universel.14 It seems likely that the relations de voyage inspired the rise of a very different kind of writing, one that featured the fictional foreigner. Sylvie Romanowski’s Through Strangers’ Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France analyzes this genre, exploring texts about foreigners from Persia, Peru, Africa, or the New World who come to France to observe and criticize its customs.15 This genre flourished in the eighteenth century. For the most part, the fictional foreigners were used to articulate and uphold the idea that French culture was universally valid, thereby supporting the nation’s colonial endeavors.

The Relations de Voyage and the Catholic Reformation The relations de voyage developed in the sixteenth century and grew in importance in the seventeenth, as travelers increased in number.16 The genre emerged within three basic contexts, which were all intertwined: religious, political, and economic. The church used the relations as an arm of the Catholic Reformation, as part of a public-relations machinery to promote its missions. The church circulated these texts systematically and aggressively, bringing the image of the sauvage alive and close inside the French consciousness. Paradoxically, were it not for the Catholic Reformation’s massive publicity, the sauvage might not have made such a deep impact on French modes of thought. The phenomenon I speak of as the “Catholic Reformation” is often called the “Counter-Reformation” among literary scholars. Each term emphasizes a different aspect of the same basic phenomenon, as historian Louis Châtellier has noted, and thus should not be used interchangeably.17 The term “Counter-Reformation” assumes that the church’s reform was aimed primarily at Protestants, countering the Reformation led by Luther and Calvin. The term “Catholic Reformation,” however, is broader, as it situates the Church in relation to several threats, not simply the Protestants. The Catholic Reformation was set in high gear when the Council of Trent was convened from 1545 to 1563 to reform and fortify Catholic doctrine, instilling more deeply rooted Catholic beliefs to expand the Roman Catholic faith. This movement sought to

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strengthen its hold over a multiplicity of different forms of otherness. Threats could come from within the community itself, taking the form of a lax or lapsed Catholic, which constituted an important category of otherness,18 as was also the Muslim.19 The newly “discovered” Native American Indian was yet another important figure of otherness that fueled the Catholic Reformation’s fires, as Châtellier has observed.20 It was no accident that the Catholic Reformation began shortly after Europeans learned that there was a previously unknown continent full of sauvages, portrayed by the relations as being without religion. The Catholic Reformation sought to bring the Christian faith to the world’s barbarians, and civilize them. The church’s empire focused on the New World because it saw the souls of Amerindians as more ripe for conversion than those of Africans and Asians because the Amerindians had not yet accumulated multiple layers of wrong opinion to be peeled away. There was nothing new, of course, about the French traveling to other parts of the world in order to convert pagans to Christianity. The Crusades in the Middle Ages stemmed from this impulse, but much had changed since then. The growing sense of the world’s expansiveness was coupled with two new important technological inventions. The first was navigational tools and improved shipbuilding, which boosted worldwide travel. The second was the printing press, which spread news about the New World and other pagan territories more readily. In bringing a portrait of the New World inhabitants closer to European consciousness, printed travel texts promoted a sudden surge in missionary activity. This period of Catholic Reform was a time of “pious propaganda,” according to historian Bernard Dompnier.21 The relations de voyage played a key role in disseminating information about missionary activity. The Catholic Reformation’s evangelizing fever gave rise to new religious orders such as the Jesuits and the Capuchins, who organized battalions of missionaries to visit lands all over the world to spread God’s word. The growth in missionary activity led to an increase in the writing and publication of the relations. The Capuchins, Recollects, Jesuits, and Sulpicians were all required to write reports about the people they visited and about their missionary activities.22 Each religious order competed with the others to boast of its efforts to bring the Catholic faith to sauvages throughout the world. At first the relations were private reports that the missionaries wrote to inform their superiors about the progress of their evangelical work. But soon after they were published, the reports became major instruments of publicity.

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The religious orders engaged in a “writing fever,” as Dompnier puts it.23 It began with Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, who co-founded the Society of Jesus. Both were models for other missionaries, traveling as they did over several continents to build a universal “empire of the cross.”24 Francis Xavier, a young Spanish priest, sent letters back to Europe about his encounters with the inhabitants of the new lands. These letters were widely circulated, and their appeal lay as much in their tales of exotic lands and strange customs as in their religious messages. Subsequently, when other missionaries traveled throughout the world, they were required to write relations about the people they encountered and their missionary activities. As a church propaganda tool, many of the relations were published in special, deluxe editions. Claude d’Abbeville’s Histoire de la mission des pères capucins about the Tupinambas in Brazil was a case in point. His relation about the French encounter with the Brazilians was printed in an ornately decorated edition, complete with eight engravings. It was published in Lyon and Paris in 1613 along with a translation in German and Italian. The success of this book in France was so overwhelming that it was necessary to print two more editions the following year. D’Abbeville’s text was part of a larger publishing effort composed of fifteen books and pamphlets describing the customs of the Tupinambas and the journey of several Tupinamba men to France, where they were baptized in front of the king and queen and then married to French girls.25 As “pious propaganda,” the relations were closely edited to serve the church’s needs. Aware that these texts could serve as fund-raising mechanisms, the editors appealed to the prevailing public taste in order to target pious philanthropists. Some of the money raised was used for dowries to promote mixed marriages. For example, Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune’s relation of 1637–38 praised several members of the Company of New France for giving dowries of four arpents of cleared land “to two young Sauvage girls who would marry several French Christians.” Father Le Jeune also praised “a worthy Lady, of whose name I have not been informed, [who] has made a present of a goodly sum of money, also to provide for the marriage of a Sauvage girl.”26 The relations were also aimed at potential recruits, enticing them to engage in missionary activity. For example, St. Jean-François Régis, an important missionary, was inspired to do missionary work after reading the relations about the New World.27 From an early age, he was an avid reader of relations, learning first about a mission in Acadia (1611–13) with the Souriquois and then later about one in Quebec (1625–29) under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain. His interest increased

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after 1632 when the Jesuit Relations began to be published as an annual series. He took every opportunity he could get to read the relations by such people as Charles Lalemant, Paul Le Jeune, Jean de Brébeuf, and Samuel de Champlain. Marie de L’Incarnation, who founded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America, was also inspired by these texts to embark on her missionary endeavors.28 The same was true of Madeleine La Peltrie, a member of the nobility whose ancestral stock went back several centuries. After her husband’s death, she became very close to Marie de L’Incarnation, and she provided funds to start an Ursuline house and church in Quebec. In addition, she put up the money for a ship crossing to the New World and worked very closely as a “lay twin” to Marie. After reading Father Le Jeune’s relations, both women were moved to devote their lives to missionary work. Another kind of reader of the relations was the potential settler or the merchant. Many relations described the potentially profitable commodities that could be found in the New World. Jacques Bouton wrote Relation de l’establissement des François depuis l’an 1635 en l’isle de la Martinique, l’une des antilles de L’Amérique: Des moeurs des sauvages, de la situation, et des autres singularitez de l’isle (1640) and elaborated on the fruits of Martinique, their medicinal herbs, sugar, and tobacco. He devoted a whole chapter to those commodities that could be transported from Martinique to France. In other relations, the authors indicated how the commodities could be adapted to the French market, including recipes of what to do with various products, such as corn. In his anthology of relations, Henri Justel devoted a whole section on how to produce sugar. The relations about Acadia and Quebec focused on the fur trade, which was one of the initial driving forces behind the French expansion throughout North America.29 In addition to the commercial opportunities in the New World, many relations often described the supposed friendliness of the native peoples. The relations were thus often a form of advertisement to induce the French to settle in the New World and/or to develop commercial ties with this part of the world. Last, but certainly not least, the king and his ministers were potential readers, with many relateurs arguing for political expansion. Jesuit missionary Le Jeune argued that “it would be an enterprise very honorable and very profitable to Old France, and very useful to the New, to establish settlements here, and to send over Colonies.” He asked, “Shall the French, alone of all the Nations of the earth, be deprived of the honor of expanding and spreading over this New World? Shall France, much more populous than all the other Kingdoms, have Inhabitants only for itself? Or, when her children leave her,

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shall they go here and there and lose the name of Frenchmen among Foreigners? . . . Would it not be better to empty Old France into New, by means of Colonies which could be sent there, than to people Foreign countries?”30 It was not really until Louis XIV assumed power that the Crown took a serious interest in colonial expansion. While all of the relations fascinated France’s reading public, the Jesuit Relations in particular stood out for their hold on the public imagination. They came out in serial form every single year from 1632 to 1674, with the reading public eagerly awaiting the next sequel.31 People both inside and outside the court anticipated the publication of each new volume, as if they formed a serial drama. The relations’s success was due in part to the Jesuits’ skill as storytellers; their education was particularly strong in rhetoric. Father Paul Le Jeune, who had published the first volume in the series, had an unusually appealing style. He often had to write in the dim light of a smoldering flame, in a musty, mosquito-filled cabin while the Native Americans indulged in raucous bear-fat feasts. Yet he managed to create a few page-turning adventures almost worthy of a Hollywood film. The details he offered up were so rich that they fascinated even readers who were not particularly compelled by his religious message. Father Le Jeune’s stories made him a cultural hero in France. His volumes had an appeal somewhat similar to our modern “reality” drama. Le Jeune described how he had followed the Montagnais and the Algonquins into the woods for several winters in order to learn their languages. After seventeen years in the wilds of New France, he returned to Paris, where he became a regular fixture at court. According to a contemporary observer, “he earned the confidence and respect of a large number of people of quality. . . . The king himself and the queen mother showed him great affection.”32 He regaled the courtiers with tales of his experiences, stirring great interest in the New World. Although at first the missionaries wrote their relations as private reports to their superiors as a way to communicate with other missionaries, the church soon realized that these reports could serve other functions.33 In 1632 when Father Superior Jacquinot in Paris received a report from Le Jeune in the New World, he was so riveted by it that he had it published. Overnight, it became the early modern French version of a best seller and the talk of the town, launching the series that became known collectively as the Jesuit Relations. Although these texts were written as first-person, eyewitness accounts, they were hardly the marginal jottings of scattered individuals expressing their personal opinions or thoughts. Quite the contrary, they had an official status

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representing the church as an institution. Each volume ran a gauntlet of editorial committees. Each report began with the priests in the field who would write up their experiences. These reports were then taken by summer canoe to the superior in Quebec, who could compile them. He would copy some verbatim, rewrite others, and then send the whole package to the Jesuit headquarters in Paris. The committee there might make further changes before finally sending them to the printer.34 This committee was a French committee, even though the Jesuits were an international order directly under the pope. The publication of these relations was “almost entirely a French operation,” as historian Allan Greer has put it.35 Significantly, the texts were written in French, not in Latin.36 The Jesuits wanted to ensure that these reports would appeal to a wide reading public. The state also approved the finished manuscripts, and the king’s official printer, Sébastien Cramoisy, published them. When publication of the Jesuit Relations ceased after the fortieth volume in 1674, many similar writings found their way into the hands of the public. Numerous independent publishers in Paris and Lyons were eager to publish them.37 Some appeared in Latin, some in Italian. Publications such as Mercure François and Annuae Litterae Societatis Jesu occasionally published letters from the missionaries that were quite similar to the Jesuit Relations, although their tone was more personal. Moreover, other forms of writing about the New World became available to the French reading public. For example, Marie de L’Incarnation became an important source of information for French readers about life in Quebec. When she left her French home in 1639 to found a convent and school for girls in North America, she had left behind a young son, Claude Martin. He begged her to write to him about her life, and she sent him her notebooks. She insisted that he keep them as a private communication, but five years after her death he had them published in Paris in 1677. He revised them and made a number of additions of his own, including some of her other writings. He published them under the title La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de L’Incarnation.38

The Relations and the Politics of Expansion As a genre, the relation was spurred on not only by the Catholic Reformation but also by Columbus’s encounter with the New World. Columbus’s unexpected news about a hitherto unknown land inhabited by strange, nonChristian people captured the interest of many Europeans curious about their

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customs. In a letter of 14 March 1493, Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella describing the New World as a place of immense and largely unexploited wealth.39 He observed that its inhabitants were so docile and generous that they did not refuse the asker anything he requested and willingly “exchanged . . . valuable things for trifles.” Columbus then promised that “if I am supported by some little assistance from them [the king and queen], I will give them as much gold as they have need of, and in addition spices, cotton, and . . . aloeswood.”40 He also emphasized the possibility of converting the American Indians to Christianity. Columbus’s letter was published in many languages besides the Spanish original. It was published in Latin in Paris, as well as in Rome, Antwerp, Basel, and Poland. Twenty-two editions of his letter are known, sixteen of which appeared in the fifteenth century.41 With astonishing speed, his letter was made available throughout Europe.42 While the news of a new world was interesting in itself, one of its main attractions was the enormous potential for expanded economic opportunities. Columbus’s letter constituted a rudimentary form of travel literature.43 In a similar vein, Amerigo Vespucci described his voyages in letters which reached an even wider readership. More than sixty editions of his letters were published between 1502 and 1529 in cities of France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and what later became Czechoslovakia. Like Columbus, Vespucci emphasized the riches that could be had by mining the New World’s abundant resources. And like Columbus, he stressed that its inhabitants “are liberal in giving, for it is rare they deny you anything.”44 Among the many things that the Amerindian men supposedly offered the Europeans were their wives and daughters. Vespucci was fascinated by their sexual practices, and he emphasized what he viewed as a sexual promiscuity. As early forms of the travel narrative, Columbus’s and Vespucci’s letters were included in anthologies of texts with other travel accounts of the sixteenth century. In 1515, the first collection of such accounts appeared in French. These texts were translated and abridged by lawyer Mathurin Du Redouer from Professor Fracanzano da Montalboddo’s prototype compilation, Paesi novamente retrovati, first published in Italian in 1507. This compilation also included texts of Pigafetta, Cadamosto, Cortes, and others. Du Redouer’s compilation was reprinted five times after its initial appearance in Paris and was entitled Sensuyt le nouveau monde et navigations faictes par Emeric Vespuce Florentin: Des pays et isles nouvellement trouvez auparavant à nous inconnuz tant en l’Ethiope que Arabie, Calichut et autres plusieurs régions étranges.45 By the

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seventeenth century, more and more French travelers were journeying to the New World and writing their own relations. Arguing for the benefits of economic gain, Samuel de Champlain, in his Voyages, 1604–7, encouraged exploration of the New World to promote France’s political expansion and greatness. He wrote that Ancient Rome rose to greatness of because of its trade “transacted on the sea.” The Romans were able to achieve their “sovereignty and mastery over the entire world” because they could “fill up the regions of the interior with the objects of beauty and rarity obtained from foreign nations.”46 Champlain urged that France achieve an equivalent mastery in a similar way. The French travel writers who followed in Columbus’s wake were interested in evangelization as well as the benefits of economic and political expansion.47 In many ways, the religious, economic, and political goals were all interdependent, each buttressing the other, although in practice they were often at odds with each other. Many missionaries appealed to the merchants for financial support, highlighting the economic benefits of expansion. Jesuit Father Le Jeune stressed to Louis XIII and his minister the economic and political benefits to be gained from the New World. With so much unemployment in France, he pointed out, many workmen had to go “begging their bread from door to door, some of them resort[ing] to stealing and public brigandage, others to larceny and secret frauds.” Unemployed French workers should be shipped off to the emerging colonies, a strategy that would “strengthen New France; for those who will be born in New France, will be French. . . . The son of a French artisan born in Spain is a Spaniard; but, if he is born in New France, he will be a Frenchman.”48 In sum, the relations were written to capture the French imagination because they were meant to lobby the state and potential donors for financial aid, and designed to stimulate the French to emigrate to the New World, either as settlers, traders, or missionaries. As tools to promote economic, political, and religious expansion, the relations thus constituted a major channel through which the French reading public learned about the Native American sauvages and their world.

The Relations de Voyage as a Frame for This Book Because the relations de voyage shaped the perceptions of the French reading public about the nation’s encounter with the New World, these texts correspondingly shape my own consideration of this contact in several ways. First,

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they determine my geographic focus. The relateurs wrote reports about the nation’s colonial activities in what is now Eastern Canada, some portions of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, Florida, Louisiana, Brazil, and the Caribbean. I do not include the Caribbean in my discussion, however, because it was not the object of as many relations as the other parts of the Americas were. As a result, it figured less strongly in the French imagination. Moreover, the Caribbean did not have the symbolic status that New France in Canada did. Most of the missionaries who worked in the Caribbean islands were Dominicans, who did not write as many reports as the Jesuits did. I do not include Louisiana, since France’s colonial activity there really began in earnest only toward the end of the seventeenth century, and mostly in the eighteenth, which is beyond the scope of this book. Second, the relations determine my choice of issues. Slavery was, to be sure, an important phenomenon, especially once the slave trade was officially launched in 1670, although slaves were present in the fledgling colonies almost from their inception. However, slavery was not as widely employed in the northeastern part of the Americas as it was in the Caribbean.49 I do not discuss slavery because not only was it less pronounced in those areas but also, as Madeleine Dobie has shown, this aspect of the nation’s colonial policy was inherently “unrepresentable” in France, and its traces in the relations were more covert than overt. Slaves and slavery were subject to an ambivalent discourse that relegated them to the margins of representation.50 Third, I adopt the language of the relations, which clearly reflects the colonizer’s perspective. Their language is troubling, raising thorny issues about how to refer to the New World inhabitants. Historians of the Atlantic World insist on using their tribal names. However, such usage gives the impression of a greater historical specificity than my analytic perspective warrants. While some French travelers did distinguish between different tribes when those distinctions mattered, this was not a consistent strategy.51 It is common to read more than seventy-five pages of text with scant reference to any particular tribe. But most important, such distinctions do not matter for my purposes. French travel writers often did not distinguish between tribes, since they were writing mainly for an audience at home, where highly educated people often did not make even more basic distinctions between the New World and India.52 Instead of tribal designations, I frequently use the term “other” because it conveys the colonizer’s perceptual reality, which did not understand the Native Americans on their own terms or understand their specificity, as many scholars have observed.53 Like Tacitus and Pliny, French writers comprehended the

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inhabitants of foreign lands within their nation’s own categories of thought, often perceiving outsiders simply as an indistinct other. Writing from the colonizer’s perspective, I use the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” to refer to the Natives Peoples of America. Such terms are, of course, highly objectionable, as the modern Mi’kmaq author and columnist Daniel Paul has argued. He wrote that these terms are “not now a fitting description . . . we must assume that the early writers used the terms because of their belief in the superiority of their own race. In other words, they were racist.”54 Paul is correct, to be sure. However, to simply erase this offensive terminology within a historical context is problematic if one’s goal is to understand the colonizer. Allan Greer encountered a similar dilemma when he translated the Jesuit Relations, which frequently used these terms. He substituted the terms “Indians” and “natives” for the French terms sauvage and “barbare,” except when the meaning was clearly “savagery.”55 He defended his substitution by arguing that the French term sauvage had meanings that are not conveyed by its English analogue. He, and also historian Gordon Sayre, have rightly observed that the French term sauvage has meanings that get lost in the English translation.56 In French, sauvage has a more positive connotation because its meaning is closer to the Latin root of salvaticus. Conjuring up the forest, salvaticus refers to the uncultivated, to that which grows wild. This term also conjures up the European legend of the Wild Man, a forest dweller who has not yet been socialized. The English and French meanings of “savage” and sauvage are thus not synonymous. Sayre’s solution was to use the French term sauvage and I have followed his lead. Although I also use the term “barbarian,” I want to re-emphasize that I do not mean to suggest that the Native Americans were in fact any more barbaric than the seventeenth-century French. Some early modern writers, such as Montaigne and Lahontan, claimed that the French were in some respects more barbaric than the Native Americans. (I use the terms “barbarian” and sauvage interchangeably for the moment. However, there were significant differences, which I discuss in chapter 8.) I also use the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” for important rhetorical reasons. Their indeterminate references enable me to evoke their mythical form at the same time as I designate their real-world embodiment. This double reference allows me to conjure up the two different colonial stories that this book tells. These terms constitute important sites of triangulation, triggering meanings in both colonial dramas at the same time. The barbarian and the sauvage existed as imagined figures who the Greeks and Romans had

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“invented” long before the Europeans “discovered” them as flesh and blood New World creatures, as Giuliano Gliozzi has observed.57 Before the French or any other European ever set foot in the Americas, they had already encountered the sauvage in their own minds as a mental concept already shaped by the Greco-Roman prototype of this mythical figure. This mythical construct then picked up additional layers of meaning when Judeo-Christian texts appropriated its use. The concepts of the barbarian and the sauvage expanded their meanings yet further when they entered France’s medieval heritage, which piled new connotations on top of its earlier layers of meaning.58 Because the mythic concepts of the barbarian and the sauvage had been in circulation since classical antiquity, they had set the stage for the Native Americans’ arrival on the scene of European history. Accordingly, these flesh and blood creatures penetrated deep into the French psyche—much deeper than would have been possible without the layers of images that preceded them. Reciprocally, the mythic sauvages were infused with greater life and prestige because real-world Native Americans came to embody them. In short, the real-world Native Americans and their mythic predecessors merged in the French imagination, each propping up the other. In addition to their mythical component, the barbarian and the sauvage gained in importance because they were the prototype of otherness. The two concepts were what one might call the universal other, since they referred not simply to Native Americans but also to Protestants, lapsed Catholics, Jews, peasants, libertines, antimonarchists, noblesse de robe, Turks, Persians, and Africans. Each group was viewed as barbaric in some form, in some contexts. Moreover, France’s humanist-educated elite often used the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” to characterize themselves, as we saw in Chapter 2. To us with our modern, twenty-first century perspective, it will no doubt seem problematic to lump such vastly different groups together. But many French writers fused them because they defined the other not positively by its distinctive features but negatively by what it lacked. What each of these different groups lacked was basically the same thing—civilization, Frenchness, Catholicity. Defined essentially by their position as outsiders, all forms of otherness fitted the same profile and thus could be grouped together. If the sauvage represented the universal other, the Native American was its quintessential embodiment. As Ter Ellingson has rightly observed, “For most of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the American Indian constituted the paradigmatic case for the ‘sauvage.’ And the term was most widely applied to them.”59 The two most important seventeenth-century dictionaries,

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the French Academy Dictionary of 1694 and Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690, used the New World Native American consistently as the major contemporary prototype exemplifying both the barbarian and the sauvage.60 barbare. Adj. Sauvage, which has neither laws nor politeness. It is a barbaric people. The Iroquois are truly barbaric. One also calls barbaric a language which has nothing to do with our own, which is rude and shocks our ear. The Iroquois speak a very barbaric language. (French Academy, s.v. Barbare) barbare. Adj. A foreigner from a distant place, sauvage, impolite, cruel, who has manners very different from ours. . . . The sauvages of America are very barbaric. (Furetière, s.v. Barbare) sauvage, certain people who ordinarily live in the woods, without religion, laws, without a fixed dwelling, and more like animals than men. The sauvage peoples of America. . . . The Sauvages of America. (French Academy, s.v. Sauvage) sauvage, wandering men, who are without ordered dwellings, without Religion, without Laws, and without Police. Almost all of America is peopled by such Sauvages. (Furetière, s.v. Sauvage)61 These definitions corroborate Ellingson’s observation that the Native American was the prototype of the barbarian and the sauvage in early modern France. Because the relations constitute the lens through which I view the FrenchAmerindian encounter, I of necessity use a second problematic term: “assimilation.” This term is troublesome not simply because it is anachronistic, as I have already discussed. It also gravely distorts the historical reality of the encounter by suggesting that the colonizer’s perception of dominance prevailed. Implied in the concept of assimilation is a top-down dynamic in which the colonizer molded the colonized without being affected in return. The term thus gives the erroneous impression that the American Indians in fact abandoned their customs, beliefs, and ways of life to adopt those of the French. This one-way model of influence, however, was far from the case. Historians of the Atlantic World thus reject the term “assimilation,” preferring alternatives such as a “middle ground,” “mutual accommodation,” “hybridity,” and other related terms to indicate that the colonial encounter gave way to new cultural practices that were neither French nor Indian but created a newly formed blended world.62 My goal, however, is to capture what the colonizers perceived as the truth because these perceptions were what shaped the development of

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French culture. Had the French reading public understood what was really happening on the ground, it is dubious that they would have supported the nation’s colonial policy. I thus use the terms that the French colonizers would have found ideologically acceptable at the time. The popularity of the relations de voyage suggests that the nation’s colonial policy, understood as assimilative, was ideologically compatible with the broader range of thought in early modern France. The relations de voyage were the most important mirror of how the literate public understood the nation’s colonial encounter with the New World.

chapter 4

France’s Colonial History From Sauvages into Civilized French Catholics

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. —Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” (1919) Conversion is a loving form of destruction. —Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)

Barbarians at the Gate In 1613, barbarians arrived at the gates of France. But they were not there to break them down. They did not have to. They were invited guests. Louis XIII and the regent queen, Marie de Médecis, as well as the Capuchin Order, were their hosts.1 These barbarians were Native American boys from the Tupinamba tribe in Brazil. Capuchin Father Claude d’Abbeville, Admiral François Razilly,2 and Lieutenant General Ravadière had spent six months in Maragnan, Brazil, to expand “the empire of the Cross” and to establish a French colony. Now the members of this expedition were bringing the boys to France. No sooner had they all set foot in Le Havre than hordes of French people honored the Native Americans with processions, ceremonies, and cannon fire. Crowds gathered around them: “there was no one, neither old nor young who did not wish to know about us and rejoice in our arrival,” wrote Father d’Abbeville.3 In Le Havre, the Native Americans were made to perform— they had to enter the church and recite the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster 91

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in their language. They did not disappoint. While the crowds in Le Havre were supposedly swept away by their joy at this spectacle, the crowds in Paris were preparing for their own spectacles. They had plenty of time to get ready because the Native Americans would spend weeks being paraded through the streets of the many towns and villages along the way, made to repeat their performance in countless churches before endless crowds. When they arrived in Rouen, Malherbe, the seventeenth-century poet, was there. Witness to their procession into the city, he was not so enthralled with the event, although he was relieved that at least they were clothed: “We had them dressed in a French way; because according to their customs they go around naked except for a rag that they put over their shameful private parts.”4 Finally on 12 April they made their entrance into Paris, where they were greeted by “many people of quality [who] expressed their happiness at our holy and fortunate conquest. They were pleased to see the poor sauvages dressed up in their handsome feathers, holding maracas in their hands.”5 D’Abbeville described their reception: “Who would have thought that the people of Paris, so accustomed to seeing rare, new things would have been so moved by the arrival of these Indians? How many times have they seen people from foreign, barbarian nations in this city, without blinking an eye? And now with the coming of these poor Indians, all Paris is aflutter, each one feeling in his heart an inexplicable joy. . . . All the streets were filled with people running to see what they could hardly believe.”6 Behind the scenes, many preparations were under way. The king entrusted the Marquis de Courtenault to take care of the boys’ education—to instruct them in Catholic doctrine and in French manners and customs. As one approached the rue St. Honoré, one could hear the echoes of hammers pounding away as construction workers erected a special, oversized altar in the Capuchin Church. Father d’Abbeville and Admiral Razilly wanted to enable the anticipated overflow crowd to witness the two key events that were already the talk of the town. In the presence of the king and queen, the Tupinamba boys were to be baptized. Then they were to be married to French girls. This story of the Native Americans in Paris marked a foundational moment in the history of what would become France’s most enduring stance towards the other—assimilation. The state and church officially fostered a colonial strategy that sought to transform sauvages into French Catholics, rendering them capable of being included in the community. This chapter describes how the relations de voyage portrayed the nation’s assimilation policy to readers in France. I argue that assimilation presented a thorny boundary dilemma: it blurred the lines of demarcation between the barbaric and the civilized.

Figure 1. François Carypyra. Tupinamba Indian in native dress. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

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Assimilation was essentially a willed transgression of the divide. It raised the question of identity for the Amerindians and for the French themselves: Were these New World natives an “us” or a “them?” This confusion echoed a similar dilemma about elite France’s relationship to the Ancients that I discussed in the previous chapters. Were the Romans an “us” or a “them”? I highlight here this identity dilemma regarding the Amerindians because it, in conjunction with the parallel dilemma vis-à-vis the Romans, shaped the development of French culture, as the chapters ahead will discuss. Father d’Abbeville framed his story of assimilation as what we might call an “extreme makeover.” Emphasizing the differences that set the Amerindians apart from the French, he then described how these sauvages were suddenly transformed into people so similar to the French that they were almost indistinguishable. Their assimilation is the story of “so remarkable a change from such contrary extremes: from Wolves to Lambs; from inhuman creatures to Christians and children of God,”7 according to d’Abbeville, signaling an almost magical shift from a “before” to an “after” stage. Painting them in their “before” state, d’Abbeville offered engravings of the boys carrying bows and arrows, completely naked except for a few feathers covering their private parts.8 He described them as “not simply ordinary sinners, but barbarians, cruel and inhuman.”9 One of them, Itapoucou, directly addressed Louis XIII in his native tongue, underscoring the Amerindians’ difference: “Chépoutouopaue nerébouirousou rebè nerepiac apouyaue opap catou nereminboèe secoremè Euhouyh trououffou vaéneiare secouremè.” Itapoucou’s speech, as the translator presented it, painted an image of the Tupinambas (or Tupis) in the “before” stage, acknowledging that they had lived “without law, without faith, all eating each other.”10 Such a description obviously accentuated their extreme differences from the French (figures 1–3). In their “before” stage, the Amerindians’ differences were so pronounced that d’Abbeville positioned them on the far side of civilization, referring to them continually as “these cannibalistic and anthropophagous animals,”11 or this “nation of cannibalistic and anthropophagous children,” or “ravenous, anthropophagous or cannibalistic wolves.”12 He could have referred to them with more neutral terms available in the vocabulary, such as “the Tupinambas,” the “Indians,” “the naturals,” “the inhabitants of Brazil,” “grafted plants,” or even “sauvages.” His choice of “cannibals” and “animals” was thus marked, not to mention loaded, especially since d’Abbeville was tapping into the heated controversies of his day about whether Native Amerindians were even human.13 And yet these extreme outsiders were brought close inside the

Figure 2. Jacques Patova. Tupinamba Indian in native dress. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

Figure 3. Anthoine Manen. Tupinamba Indian in native dress. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

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community—so close that they could marry French subjects. The “after” portrait showed the Amerindians miraculously transformed as assimilated French Catholics.14 D’Abbeville included another three engravings in which they were fully clothed, carrying the fleur-de-lis. “What sweet harmony was finally in heaven, and what sweet melodies did the blissful onlookers hear when they witnessed these Cannibals now being offered to God.”15 This sweet and civilized harmony marked the Tupis’ “after” state (figures 4–6). The king and queen officially sanctioned this assimilation process by becoming godparents to these three transformed Tupis. “It was a marvel for all the Parisians to see their Majesties so taken by this saintly exercise. They were rightfully the godparents [of the Amerindians.]”16 The bishop of Paris asked the king “to give the three of them the great name of Louis to render the name of the King their godfather more commendable among the barbarians. . . . His Majesty freely gave his consent, and thus the three were called Louis.”17 “Ouaroyio,” which meant “featherless bird on the head” in the Tupis’ native language, became “Louis Henri”; “Itapoucou,” which meant “boat’s anchor,” became “Louis Marie”; and “Iapouay,” which meant “oyster shell,” became “Louis St. Jean.” “The King’s face showed a singular pleasure at this encounter,”18 and the queen shared his delight. “Giving them new names, the Queen found it appropriate to call them Henri, Louis, and Jean.”19 In addition, “the princesses of his house demonstrated great pleasure to receive these grafted plants from Jesus Christ’s Garden.”20 D’Abbeville’s descriptions and engraved illustrations all highlighted the extreme makeover of these “cannibals” as they embarked on a journey from outsiders to insiders, from barbarism to civilization, by way of the Catholic faith and French manners. In addition to these Indians, the king and queen also took a particular interest in Pyrauana, a twelve-year-old slave boy on the island of Maragnan,21 and asked the Marquis de Courtenault to educate him properly so that “he received the same graces as the others and was made a child of God.”22 This event marked the beginning of what came to be called France’s civilizing mission, which was also a colonizing mission. Ideally, the Tupis would be taken as—or “pass”—as French Catholics. “Passing” is a term that has been used to characterize “race” relations in the United States. It has a negative connotation because it implies a transgression of boundaries that many people erroneously assumed were meaningful, as if the physiological differences separating blacks and whites reflected an essence that was both fixed and hierarchically ordered. However, for seventeenth-century France, a boundary crossing was the positive ideal, provided that it was

Figure 4. Louis Marie. Transformed Tupinamba Indian. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

Figure 5. Louis Henri. Transformed Tupinamba Indian. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

Figure 6. Louis St. Jehan. Transformed Tupinamba Indian. From Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 1614. Courtesy of Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt.

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crossed in the right way. D’Abbeville wrote: “The [Tupis’] modesty was so great and their behavior so devoted during the entire baptismal ceremony that if one did not know it, one would have thought they had been instructed in Christianity and in the Church’s ceremonies their whole lives.”23 Praising the transformed “featherless bird on the head,” d’Abbeville described Louis Henri: “His color is less dark than the others, his face well made and one would think him French rather than a foreign Sauvage.”24 D’Abbeville was delighted that this cannibal could pass as a French Catholic by ridding himself of the differences that separated him from membership in the dominant group. Admiral Razilly also dismissed the significance of the differences separating the French and the Amerindians, highlighting “passing” as the assimilationist ideal in his account of the same French mission in Brazil. Razilly claimed that the Tupis had told him that they hoped “our children will learn the law of God, your arts and sciences, and will become similar to you over time; then we will form [marriage] unions, such that henceforth, others will only take us for French.”25 Emphasizing sameness as the ideal, the Tupis supposedly insisted that “one will think us French,” adding that “in the future we will be only one people.”26 Similarly, decades later, Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune praised a Huron girl in North America: “This child has nothing sauvage about her except her appearance and color; her sweetness, her docility, her modesty, her obedience, would cause her to pass for a young well-born French girl.”27 Passing was thus the ideal in multiple contexts. The church and state picked out French girls for the Tupi boys to marry once they had been civilized and Christianized. Marriage would help these former cannibals to assimilate into the French, Catholic community. The marriage ceremony was not as widely publicized as the baptism, but the two events were linked, as Malherbe remarked: “There are women ready for them . . . only their baptism is awaited to perform the weddings and ally France with the island of Maragnan.”28 Malherbe did not attend the ceremony because he wanted to avoid the crowds, but he reported it to a friend nevertheless: “The Capuchins, in order to show full courtesy to these poor people, are intent on finding a few faithful women to marry, which I think they have already begun to do.”29 In short, this story of Native Americans in Paris staged a drama of assimilation in which outsiders became insiders. Outsiders, with differences as extreme as cannibalism, could be transformed to resemble insiders within the French Catholic community. “People living on the other side of the earth” could undergo a radical change that could “ally New France to the old one,” as Father Le Jeune described his goal.30

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Father d’Abbeville’s story dramatized assimilation in its most idealized form. In their original state, the Tupis were marked by differences so extreme that they were regarded as almost slipping off the edge of civilization. And yet they were able to transcend the boundaries of their world by shedding those differences to become like French Catholics. In their transformed, civilized state, they adhered to a world that was completely distinct from their first one. This discontinuity implied a highly differentiated world where one was either a French Catholic or an Amerindian sauvage. The concept of a hybridized community was completely foreign and inconceivable to the assimilationist ideal. D’Abbeville wanted to think that the Amerindians’ transformation was complete, enduring—and genuine. The boundaries between the two worlds were clear-cut, with the identity of each side of the divide carefully maintained, as if they followed a natural order.

Assimilation as a Boundary Dilemma Assimilation, however, had a more problematic underside, potentially posing both a boundary and an identity dilemma. By encouraging a transformation, assimilation promoted a willed and controlled transgression of the boundaries separating the civilized from the sauvage. The community’s boundaries had to be sufficiently elastic to accommodate outsiders and enable the “us” portion of the divide to expand. Had the church and the state drawn rigid boundaries, anchoring the Amerindians on the far side of a fixed “us-them” divide, and viewing them as belonging to a different order of being, then assimilation would have been inconceivable. Assimilation, then, had to define the community’s identity through features that were open to change.31 While assimilation was relatively open to the other, it needed a corresponding closedness to ensure the identity and “purity” of the “us.” Thus Louis XIV’s minister Colbert urged: “We need to act gently to make them change.” It was necessary to “detach the Algonkins and the Hurons from their sauvage customs and to oblige them to take on our own, and especially to instruct them in our language.” This could be achieved by “attract[ing] the sauvages to come live with the French, which we can do by promoting marriages and educating their children.”32 The community’s boundaries had to function like a rubber band. The boundaries would first be stretched outward to include the other after their differences had been expunged. Then the boundaries would snap back into place, as if they had never really been stretched to begin with.

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Whatever it was that constituted the “us” had to remain intact and not become influenced by a “them.” The memory that an insider was ever an outsider had to be erased to allow for one group to pass as another. In other words, the church and the state had two contradictory needs. On the one hand, they pursued a politics of expansion to incorporate the other. On the other hand, they needed to unify the community and protect its identity and purity from the other it was incorporating. The work of French culture was to negotiate these conflicting needs and its boundary dilemmas. The dilemma of stretching yet maintaining boundaries is a problem inherent in any intercultural contact. Seventeenth-century France, however, experienced this dilemma in a particularly acute form because of its unusual colonial strategy of assimilation. Its competitors, England and Holland, did not use assimilation as a dominant strategy. It is true that England had one of the most famous mixed marriages of all time—between Pocahontas and John Rolfe. But that was a distinct exception to its policy, which actively discouraged mixed marriages.33 For example, England’s King Charles II’s charter to settle Carolina placed the savages in the same category as “other enemies, pirates and robbers: persons who are to be displaced, not incorporated.”34 Governor Wyatt of Virginia wrote in 1623, “Our first work is the expulsion of the savages, for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, than to be at peace with them.”35 The English attempt to segregate the Native Americans was the forerunner of the North American Indian reservation system. The English, from the very beginning of their colonial endeavors, differed in their attitude from the French, with England’s King Henry VII issuing in 1497 the letters patent that gave John Cabot official license to “subdue, occupy and possess” the savages as their “vassals and lieutenants.”36 France’s Catholic colonial competitors, Spain and Portugal, used assimilation to a greater degree. While the case of Spanish colonization did give rise to a widespread mingling of peoples, this mixing resulted not from an official policy that actively promoted it. Rather, the state did not consistently intervene to prevent it. The Portuguese officially encouraged intermarriage only in Asia, not in the New World.37 Assimilation represented one of three basic colonizing choices. One alternative strategy was simply to kill off the indigenous people, thereby eliminating, or at least minimizing, the need for interpersonal contact. A second alternative was to dominate the population in one of several forms, such as enslaving them or separating them by means of a reservation system, as the English did. In each of the three basic colonizing strategies, the “us-them” boundaries varied in strength. Assimilation weakened these boundaries more than did

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other colonizing choices by cultivating the greatest contact between colonizer and colonized. The alternative strategy—of simply killing the native population—did not, by definition, pose a significant boundary problem. The third possibility—dominating the colonized either through enslavement or through separation—presented only a comparatively moderate boundary dilemma. France, with its assimilationist stance toward colonization, experienced a more heightened boundary dilemma than did Ancient Rome, its model for this particular choice. France’s Christian monotheism, with its image of a single, true God, did not allow for a multiplicity of religions. Similarly, its absolutist ideal of political rule required a greater conformity of cultural beliefs and practices. By contrast, the Romans, not possessing the image of a single creator deity, did not insist on a single set of religious or cultural beliefs. As such, the Roman Empire could more easily accommodate the other from a diverse religious and cultural range. The Roman ground for including outsiders was wider, enabling a relatively higher level of difference. The French state’s centralizing needs, along with Christianity’s monotheism, required a much greater degree of sameness, narrowing the grounds for acceptance into the community. This narrowness sharpened the “same/other” or “inside/outside” divide, making the boundaries more highly charged. Christianity posed less of a problem to France’s colonizing rivals; they did not officially seek to incorporate the Native Americans as closely within their communities. Historically, France’s seventeenth-century policy was unusual. Although France has always embraced assimilation as its colonial strategy of choice, its seventeenth-century version blurred the “us-them” boundaries more fully than any version at any other point in its history. As a strategy, assimilation is open to a variety of interpretations. The level of contact between colonizer and colonized can extend from a minimal to a maximal range, following either an “integrationist” or a “segregationist” model, as historian Cornelius Jaenen has described it.38 Whereas the nineteenth- and twentieth-century state promoted a segregationist stance, the seventeenth-century church and state adopted an integrationist model, which conceptualized the “us-them” boundaries in their most fluid form. According to Jaenen, integration was the church and the state’s dominant stance throughout the seventeenth century, although a strong undercurrent of civil and ecclesiastical authorities opposed it and favored a segregationist approach. Fostering integration, Colbert urged the French and Amerindians to form “one people and one blood,” thus potentially blurring the “us-them” boundaries. Ideally, the boundaries would remain firm since the Amerindians

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would forget their own customs and take on those of the French, Catholic community. Both the church and the state favored this goal. However, both institutions supported the policy at different times and in different ways. Each institution defined “peopleness” differently and often struggled against the other for control. For the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, the church was the dominant agency responsible for the development and expansion of France’s New World colonies. The Capuchins, the Recollects, the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Ursulines, and the Sulpicians all came to the New World in successive waves of missionary fervor.39 As each religious order entered the New World, it came with a first flush of optimism, dissolving boundaries to form “one people.” For example, the Jesuit Relations of 1641–42 reported that Father Ragueneau told the chief of the Iroquois that “French and Iroquois . . . shall be only one people.” The chief then touched Father Ragueneau and Sieur Nicolet on the face and chin. He said: “Not only shall our customs be your customs, but we shall be so closely united that our chins shall be reclothed with hair, and with beards like yours.’’40 Initially, many religious orders supported an integrationist stance, although they varied, depending on their respective beliefs about how civilized they thought the natives were or could become. But over time, their optimism faded into pessimism as the Native Americans failed to respond as the missionaries had anticipated. When disillusion set in, each religious order came to favor greater segregationist practices. The church-state balance shifted in 1663, when Louis XIV entered the picture and inaugurated a new phase of France’s colonial efforts.41 When the state took a more direct interest in the New World, it did so with the same kind of optimism about assimilation as had the missionaries, encouraging a higher level of integration.42 Despite their obvious differences, both the church and the state largely supported an integrationist approach to assimilation, as many scholars have shown.43 The Capuchins took the lead in France’s colonial venture in Brazil, encouraging an integrationist stance, as the case of the Amerindians in Paris clearly indicated. The Jesuits eventually became the dominant missionary group, and by the early part of the seventeenth century they were responsible for the church’s evangelizing endeavor. They had vied with the other religious orders to gain the right to direct the missionary enterprise and finally received official authorization in 1632. At first, they, like the Capuchins, were extremely optimistic. Enthusiastically embracing intermarriage, Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune wrote: “These little [sauvage] girls, brought up as Christians and then married to Frenchmen, or baptised Sauvages will draw as many children

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from their Nation as we shall desire. All will lie in our succoring them, in giving them a dowry, in helping them to get married.”44 He urged that dowries be offered to induce French men to prefer marriage over illicit unions and to encourage Native American women to adhere to their new French way of life. Dowries were “the very best means to render the marriages of the Sauvages permanent and indissoluble. For a husband will not so readily leave a wife who brings him a respectable dowry; and a woman, having her possessions near our French settlements, will not readily leave them, any more than her husband.”45 The Jesuits approvingly presented the ideal of “one people” as their own, echoing that of Samuel de Champlain. A few years later in the Jesuit Relations of 1636, Champlain told the Hurons that “[the French] would readily come into their Country, and would marry their daughters.” Again, in 1637, the Jesuit Relations reported that Champlain had promised them the year before that the French and Hurons would no longer be other than “one people.”46 By 1640, however, many Jesuits found intermarriage problematic, since it was not working as planned.47 Disillusioned, some Jesuits increasingly imposed more boundaries, segregating the Indians, following Paraguay’s lead, which had formed reducciones, or Native American reservations. The Jesuit form of segregation separated the Amerindians from the French in processions, in church pews, and eventually in separate churches. They also separated some children in classrooms and dormitories.48 The earliest “Indian reservations” in Canada were at Sillery, Jeune Lorette, St. François de Sales, Oka, and Sault St. Louis.49 Yet, despite these segregationist moves, the Jesuits found themselves falling back into integrationist practices for practical reasons, such as when a fire in the seminary dormitory forced the French and the Native American children to be lodged together. In addition, the lack of students required both groups of pupils to be educated together.50 The Jesuits’ practices thus wavered in their construction of boundaries. While both the church and the state predominantly supported the integrationist goal of forming “one people,” each defined peoplehood and the integrating process differently. Members of the state put the primary emphasis on a civilizing process, combined with a Frenchification, although they also thought a Christianization was essential. Correspondingly, members of the church highlighted an evangelizing process but also urged that Amerindians adopt French manners and customs. For example, Champlain emphasized Frenchification more than religious conversion, although both were important. He urged the king not to rely simply on the missionaries alone, and not to give them the sole power of defining how the community would be defined.

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While Champlain did invite Recollect missionaries to the New World to help colonize the Indians, he also encouraged the king to “send communities and colonies there, to teach the people the knowledge of God, and inform them of the glory and triumphs of your Majesty, so that together with the French language they may also acquire a French heart and spirit.”51 To acquire a “French heart and spirit,” the Native Americans would have to learn about French manners and customs as well as how the French live with their wives and children, “how they cultivate and plant the soil, how [they] obey [their] laws, how [they] take care of animals, and how [they] manufacture all that we see proceeding from [their] inventive skill.”52 In short, Champlain saw a “French heart and spirit” as the core value that defined the community. Committed to the ideal of “one people,” Richelieu saw Frenchness as its defining quality, but still insisted on evangelization.53 In 1627, he founded the Company of New France, also known as the Company of the One Hundred Associates (1627). Its shareholders were composed of merchants, government officeholders, nobles, and clergy. Richelieu inserted a provision in its founding charter, Article XVII, which asserted that “the descendants of the French who would live in Canada” would henceforth be considered French.54 He extended to them the same “naturalité française” as those who had been born in France itself. If the Native Americans converted to Catholicism and chose to reside in France, they should be legally treated as natural-born French subjects, accorded the same rights: “They will be counted and accepted as French naturals . . . the true [regnicoles] and natives of France.”55 What it meant to be a “French natural” was that one was exempt from the droit d’aubaine.56 This law applied to all nonnaturalized foreigners, who were taxed upon their death. Foreigners could not transfer their estate to their family members but had to give it to the state. In granting the Native Americans the same legal status as natural-born French subjects, Richelieu was not in any danger of being besieged by such requests, since not many American Indians were eager to reside in France. Nevertheless, this ordinance represents a significant symbolic commitment to the ideal of “one people.” While Richelieu’s decree enabling sauvages to become French naturals was part of an official document, it was publicized by being reprinted and circulated in the Mercure François.57 Louis XIV also promoted “one people,” urging Bishop Laval to work for the conversion of the indigenous peoples; the king wrote that “in order that they form only one people,” the Amerindians should take on a civilized French form of life and reject their own. The king, particularly interested in the Amerindian children, told Laval that if their parents presented an obstacle, “at least

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all possible efforts should be made to oblige them to give up their children that they may be reared after the French manner and instructed in our religion.”58 Colbert also supported an integrationist model of assimilation, urging that “if it is possible to mix them, over time, having the same law and the same master, they will thus form one people and one blood.”59 Moreover, it was necessary to “instruct the children of the sauvages and to render them capable of being admitted into the common life of the French, so that they only compose one people.”60 Colbert continually repeated that the Native Americans be “instructed in the maxims of our religion and in our manners,” so that “they can compose along with the inhabitants of Canada one people and by this means fortify the colony.”61 Concerned with preserving the boundaries of a French, Catholic identity, Colbert wanted to ensure that the French would assimilate the natives rather than the reverse. To this end, he specified that the French should outnumber the Indians in the settlements, as Colbert wrote to Louis XIV in 1678: “You will observe that although his Majesty thinks it advantageous to attract entire Indian villages within and in between the French settlements, nevertheless it would be better to mix the Indians with the French in much smaller numbers, that is, one Indian for seven or eight Frenchmen in the localities settled by the French.”62 As a practical matter, however, the opposite was most often the case. It proved impossible to establish the clear boundaries the king had in mind. The Crown and the church quarreled over the boundary issue and the formation of “one people” in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign. Colbert reissued many of the same basic proposals the church had put forward decades earlier, but then came to doubt their desirability.63 In 1668, Colbert promoted the founding of a seminary for young Amerindians, as had the Jesuits. But by this time, many Jesuits were now advocating a segregationist strategy. However, they did so because of what they perceived as logistical problems of insufficient resources, not because they objected in principle to integration. When the crown eventually became more committed to integration, it blamed the Jesuits for not implementing the assimilation policy properly. The two institutions then clashed over this issue,64 as well as others.65 Lashing out at the Jesuits, Colbert complained: “The Jesuits’ maxim was not to encourage the native peoples to live in the same community with the French, either by granting them land and communal dwellings, or by educating their children and fostering marriages. Their reason was that they wanted to preserve more purely the sanctity of our religion’s principles by converting the sauvages in their current form of life rather than by calling them to live amongst the French.”66 The

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most basic principle of religion, as Colbert understood it, was to expand the community, and this included intermarriage. He thought the Jesuits’ strategy was “far from good behavior, as the church and the State have determined it. It is necessary to act with kindness to make the [Native Americans] change their behavior and to employ all the temporal authority to attract these sauvages among the French people, which can be done only through marriage and through educating their children.”67 However, the Crown eventually became disillusioned with this form of assimilation and harbored the same doubts as the Jesuits and other missionaries.68 Their objections focused on the boundary dilemmas: How it was possible to maintain a clear divide, especially in the wilderness where the French were outnumbered and were far from their center in France.

Education and the Vicious Circle of Boundaries Education was essential to help the community maintain and protect its boundaries. Ideally, schooling the Amerindians in what it meant to be a French Catholic would help the original boundaries to snap back into place after they had been temporarily stretched to incorporate the newcomers. However, this policy ended up eroding the very boundaries meant to protect the French. The traditional modes of education could not prevail in the New World. First, no educational infrastructure was in place; no textbooks, schools, or formal institutions existed. The French did create some schools and seminaries, but they were not very effective because the Native Americans were not accustomed to French discipline. As Father Le Jeune had observed, the Amerindians felt confined by the schools: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like.”69 Native American children were accustomed to roaming the woods freely and learning a different kind of knowledge, such as reading the forests. They literally climbed the walls, and thus the schools’ absentee list became very long indeed. The Ursuline nun Marie de L’Incarnation wrote that if the Native American girls were confined in seminaries, they became sad and took off “by whim or caprice; they climb our palisade like squirrels, which is as high as a stone wall, and run off into the woods.”70 These sauvages seemed the polar opposite of the elite French ideal of disciplined, contained behavior. The French observers saw the Native Americans as nomads, which constituted one of the biggest obstacles for the French because students on the move

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are difficult to educate.71 One solution was simply to trail after them into the woods, and that was what many of the Jesuits did. Father Le Jeune described the hardships of following after them: “The inns found on the way are the woods themselves . . . with the sky for a roof. The wine of this inn is snow water. . . . Their best dish is smoked eel. . . . To sleep on the earth, covered with a few branches of pine, nothing but the bark between the snow and your head; to drag your baggage over the mountains, alongside you through the heavy snow, to eat only once in two or three days, when there is no hunting.”72 Instructing Amerindians on the move was hardly the best form of education and alternatives had to be found. The French church and state thus loosened the boundaries, urging French families to live in community with Amerindians, side-by-side, and adopt Native American children into their homes. In this way, the role of educator devolved to ordinary French Catholics, who would teach the American Indians through their simple, daily act of living. The Native Americans would learn how to become French Catholics by “associating with civilized people,” in Champlain’s opinion.73 In this method of “exemplarity,” the French, residing in close contact with the Native Americans, would serve as concrete, living examples of Frenchness and Christianity. Richelieu fostered this form of education: “The only way to dispose these people [the Native Americans] to the true knowledge of God, was to populate said country with natural French Catholics, and by their example dispose these peoples to the knowledge of the Christian religion, to civil life, and to establish Royal authority” (my emphasis).74 A priest reported in the Jesuit Relations of 1668, “As the King has notified me that he desired us to attempt to bring up the little Sauvage children after the French manner of life, in order to civilize them, little by little, I have formed a Seminary, into which I have taken a number of children for this express purpose. In order to succeed the better, I have been obliged to join with them, some little French children, from whom, by living with them, the Sauvages will learn more easily the customs and the language.”75 The governor of New France, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, informed the king in 1679 that, to educate the Native American children, it was necessary first to “draw their fathers and mothers into our dwellings to better instruct them in the Christian language and in French moeurs.”76 Champlain wrote to the king that the colonists should live with Native Americans so as “to teach the people the knowledge of God, and inform them of the glory and triumphs of your Majesty, so that together with the French language they may also acquire a French heart and spirit.”77 However, because teaching from the safe distance

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of a separate space was not possible, this educational structure became implicated in a dangerous circular logic. On the one hand, the church and the state needed to civilize the Native Americans before they entered into steady contact with the French. But how could the French civilize them without first having contact with them? This circle became ever more vicious because the church and the state were unable to command sufficient authority to impose sharply drawn, fixed boundaries.

Motivations for France’s Assimilation Policy Given that boundaries posed such thorny issues, one might wonder why the French church and state chose an assimilative strategy that challenged them so strongly. What was their motivation? At a practical level, the church and the state thought that assimilation was best suited to France’s demographic and economic needs. France was relatively slow in comparison with its European rivals to colonize the New World. While Spain, Portugal, England, and Holland had begun serious colonization in the sixteenth century, the French church and state did not really start their colonizing activities in earnest until the seventeenth century.78 The French had made some attempts in the sixteenth century in Canada, Brazil, and Florida, but those were ill conceived and failed.79 Hampered by internal religious fighting, the church and state had to wait until 1598 when Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, before they could turn their energies and resources outward and to expand their sphere of influence. Once they set their sites on the New World, the church and the state needed to make up for lost time and catch up to their rivals. But this was no easy task, since populating these remote lands was difficult. When Richelieu began to revitalize France’s colonizing efforts in 1627, there were fewer than five hundred French people in New France, whereas there were twenty thousand English in New England.80 Finding enough women was no easy matter. In Canada especially, women were scarce. When ship captains arrived from France, they were bombarded with questions about whether any women were on board. The difficulties of populating the French colonies thus called for unusual measures. Intermarriage seemed a better solution than large-scale importation of immigrants from France.81 The church and the state felt the nation could spare very few people to populate its new colony. Sending thousands from France would have depleted the mother country of its much-needed

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inhabitants. In effect, the French church and state wanted to use Native American women as producers of babies to populate the land quickly. The founders of Montreal wrote: “If marriages are formed between the French and the Christian Sauvages, . . . in this way the country will easily be populated. . . . And these small nations will multiply more in ten years than they have in the past hundred years, which will be much to France’s honor, for it will acquire many subjects capable of helping it one day and will also provide useful merchandise.”82 Intermarriage would thus speed up the colonizing process. Moreover, the church and the state thought that French women were not strong enough to survive the long trip to the New World and to endure the harsh conditions there. Concerned with populating New France, the state devised another plan. During the 1670s in particular, Colbert had numerous “daughters of the king” sent over from France.83 Most of these “daughters” were orphan girls rounded up in Paris and marched to the ports, from where they were then transported across the Atlantic. After reaching distant shores, they were promptly married off to French colonists there. Their duty was to quickly produce lots of children and, in their spare time, help with chores in the settlements and cultivate the land. Colbert observed that because many of these girls had been taken from hospitals in France, they were not sufficiently robust to resist the climate or cultivate the land.84 Many of them, overcome with fatigue, simply died. Perceived as weaker than Native American women, French women lacked the physical strength required to populate the colony. In addition to these demographic issues, economic factors dictated this policy. The French economy in the New World was based on fishing, fur trapping, and trade.85 These industries could only succeed with great levels of cooperation and good will. The French needed to learn new fishing, hunting, and trapping techniques. Moreover, they needed guides to learn how to navigate the treacherous terrain and to survive in hostile weather. Unable to read the forests, Champlain described how he would get lost for days on end without an “Indian guide.” Such cooperation was not necessary for the English colonists, whose economy was more self-sufficient. Agriculture formed the foundation for their economy, and they could rely on the same skills of tilling the land that they had mastered in their home country. Because the English were economically more independent, they did not need to curry favor with the Native Americans. In fact, their agricultural needs put them in direct competition for

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land. Thus the English used military force to wrest the land from the Native Americans. For the French, however, using physical force would have undermined their economic interests. Trade necessitated good human relations, as trust was central to any trading relationship. Father Le Jeune described the interdependence of the French colonists and the Native Americans when he wrote of how the French needed to live and work with the Algonquins and Montagnais to learn where the best hunting and fishing spots were. Unable to manage on their own, the French developed a camaraderie with the Algonquins and Montagnais, who “stay over night among us; we rove about with them and live among them without arms and without fear; and as has thus far appeared, without danger. This intimacy arose partly from association while fishing for Cod, which abound in these waters, and partly from trading in furs.”86 Moreover, cooperation was necessary because the French were vastly outnumbered and could not have survived without forging significant alliances and personal relations with the native people. Pressing though these demographic and economic needs were, they would have not prevailed had they not also been supported by an ideological structure. The beliefs that made France’s assimilationist policy ideologically acceptable were rooted in the very foundations of France—the nation’s Roman and Catholic heritages. The dream of a worldwide expansion was a key feature of both traditions. Livy expressed the Roman ideal: “The empire of the Roman people shall be extended to the furthest ends of the earth.”87 According to Anthony Pagden, the Imperium Romanum by the first century C.E. came to be “identified simply with ‘the world,’ the orbis terrarum or orbis terrae. . . . Livy made Romulus express the wish that ‘my Rome shall be the head of the world’. . . . Cicero spoke in De re publica of ‘[o]ur own people whose empire now holds the whole world.’”88 Roman culture would become a universal culture as part of its civilizing mission and, ideally, include the whole world within its civitas. Christianity built its dream of empire on the Roman universalist dream of civilizing the world’s barbarians, bringing them within a Christianized community.89 From the very beginning, the church expanded its boundaries to include all of humanity because Christ had died for all people. Pope Innocent VIII reaffirmed that a fundamental tenet of the Roman Catholic Church was to spread God’s word to all parts of the world and convert nonbelievers to Christianity. In the incipit of his bull Orthodoxe fidei propagationem on 13 December 1486, the pope wrote: “Our chief concern and commission from

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heaven is the propagation of the orthodox faith, the increase of the Christian religion, the salvation of barbarian nations, and the repression of the infidels and their conversion to the faith.”90 To extend the boundaries of Christendom worldwide was a moral duty, as ignorance supposedly kept the heathens from salvation. The pope was thus following Christ’s imperative: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations.”91 Christ’s words reverberated in St. Jerome’s rendering of Psalm 18, verse 5: “Their sound has been spread through the world and the Word had reached to the end of the Earth.” Ultimately this vast expansion would unite all peoples worldwide to form one indistinguishable whole. The barbarians would cast aside their differences to convert and become assimilated into the unified, universal Christian family. In this ideal vision, all boundaries would dissolve because the entire world would form an all-inclusive “us,” united by the sameness of their beliefs. The Roman colonization of the Gauls also served to legitimate the French colonial dynamic in the New World. France’s relationship to Ancient Rome was double. In the first relationship, France imagined itself as aligned with the Ancient Romans as civilizers/colonizers. The French church and state aspired to bring “the light of the Christian faith and religion” and French civilization to the Native Americans, just as the Romans had brought their wisdom to the barbarians of their world.92 According to Father Le Jeune, the Hurons were begging the French to: “Come, help us, bring into our country the torch which has never yet illuminated it!”93 The image of the torch of enlightenment burned brightly over France’s entire evangelical/colonial enterprise, beginning with Henri IV, who in 1603, instructed the Duke of Montmorency to go to North America to “lead the natives to the Christian faith, to teach these barbarian atheists a civilized and orderly life, removing them from the state of ignorance and faithlessness in which they now live.”94 France as the New Rome was holding up the same basic torch for the barbarians of their world as the Romans had for their ancestors in Gaul. France’s Roman and Catholic heritages buttressed the belief that their nation could expand its borders to transform and include creatures from the far side of civilization. The Roman colonization of Gaul supported France’s colonial expansion in a second way. Just as the Gauls were supposedly eager to be civilized/colonized by the Romans, and just as many early modern French elites supposedly welcomed the Romans as models of civility, now the Native Americans would welcome the French as their civilizers/colonizers. Champlain supposedly reported to Father Le Jeune that a Huron, eager to become a French

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Catholic, had told him: “We renounce all our follies, and trample under foot all our old customs.”95 This voluntary imitative structure meant that protective boundaries would emerge naturally from the supposed cultural authority of the colonizer. The elite assumed that the identity of the French Catholic community could remain pure because its boundaries were tightly formed by France’s cultural superiority. Assimilation was ideologically buttressed by both the Ancients and by the Christian God, since both functioned as implied guarantors, ensuring that the higher power would influence the lower, and not the reverse. While the boundaries were temporarily stretched to include the other, this stretching would only be momentary. The boundaries would resume their original shape to reaffirm the initial “us-them” divide and maintain the supposed purity of the insider group. These boundaries were not lines drawn on a map or physical fortifications imposed by force, they were drawn where it counted—in the souls of the colonized. “Passing” supposedly meant a true change of heart, not a deception. Passing would paradoxically ensure the boundaries, not dissolve them, by preventing a synthesis of both worlds. The differences between the French and Amerindian worlds would supposedly prevent a métissage because it was inconceivable to the French that they could ever be mixed, much as water and oil could never be mixed. The Amerindians would pass from their old life as sauvages, killing it off to be born again as French Catholics. In sum, France’s idealized Roman-Gallic relationship, which was a legacy of the memory war from the sixteenth century, became a model for early modern France’s assimilationist stance towards the New World Indians. The RomeGaul relationship constituted the background against which the dynamic between France and the New World was played out: if the French nation could claim to have a New France, this meant that France had transcended its own barbaric past and was truly the New Rome.

A Reverse Influence: Regressing into Barbarism The status of the Gauls/French as the colonized other, however, also had a negative underside which worked to undermine the nation’s colonial policy in the New World. The specter of this barbaric past haunted the relations, placing the French at risk for being pulled downward. In the New World, the French were, theoretically, in control and served as models of civility for the Amerindians. But in practice, the French had to transgress their own rules of civility

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to accommodate the Native Americans, who were not as eager to become like the French as their theory had presupposed.96 In the wilderness, the most devout men of God fell prey to the temptations of savagery. Le Jeune himself feared for his soul when, having to cross the threshold of civilization to live among the Amerindians, he felt the urge to regress into primitivism. “Sometimes God hides himself, and then the Cup is very bitter,” he noted; his faith was continually tested.97 For him, the greatest danger lay not in the physical hardship he had to endure but rather in situations “when it [was] necessary to become a sauvage with the Sauvages.”98 As he wrote to Richelieu: “I don’t know if I myself am not becoming sauvage by conversing every day with the sauvages.”99 Several French priests expressed doubts about their own ability to hold true to their French, Catholic identity without being tainted by their contact with sauvages. If men of the cloth found it difficult to maintain their boundaries, the colonists struggled against this dilemma even more fiercely. They often had to adopt Indian practices to meet the necessities of everyday living.100 The French had to speak the Indian languages. Moreover, they had to participate in their practices, such as drinking soup with a shoe in it or feasting on bear fat. The Amerindians would become angry if the French did not join in. One host became furious at a Frenchman: “Why hast thou come here if thou dost not wish to take part in the feast? Thou must eat all that, otherwise our feast will be spoiled.”101 To appease his host, the Frenchman took a tiny bite but conveyed his distaste. His host then accused him of stupidity and of having only a small heart, as he did not have a large stomach. Finally the Frenchman capitulated and wolfed down the food, realizing that reciprocation was essential. That the French had to speak the Indian tongues and eat the Native American foods might not seem like a very transgressive act to us. But the French elite believed at this time that one’s very being was shaped by the language one spoke102 and by the food one ate.103 Marriage with sauvages was, needless to say, even more dangerous. Its goal was “to make them like us, to give them the knowledge of the true God, and to teach them to keep his holy commandments and that the marriages of which we were speaking were to be stable and perpetual.”104 However, Le Jeune, referring to the complexities of marital relations, expressed concern that this intimate contact caused French men “to become barbarians and make themselves similar to [the Indians].”105 The fear of a reverse influence grew as the stories about backsliding became increasingly prevalent. Jesuit Father François Le Mercier expressed anxieties about intermarriage

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in 1637 when the father superior had visited the Huron and Algonquin chiefs to promote such unions. The French were disturbed that the Amerindian chiefs were not concerned with the legalities of marriage ceremonies and rights, proposing instead marriages “à la façon du pays,” continuing the most prevalent form of union. The Amerindian chief wondered why the French were so obsessed with official ceremonies. “Those Frenchmen who wanted to marry were free to take wives as they wished; those who had married in the past had not demanded a general council for that purpose, but had just taken them in whatever way they had desired.”106 Father Le Mercier did not approve of such a casual, unstable approach. Not surprisingly, many of the marital negotiations reached an impasse: “This is the situation in regard to these marriages. Some of our Frenchmen had thought seriously of going farther, and of carrying out this plan, and [marriage] seems indeed to be advantageous to Christianity; but some obstacles were thrown in the way.”107 Although some missionaries viewed intermarriages as advantageous, others did not. Le Mercier warned: “Many things are to be considered before engaging in marriage— especially among barbarous peoples like these.”108 The threat of a reverse influence was such a strong undercurrent that it haunted the entire assimilationist endeavor. Governor Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville had doubts about France’s assimilation policy because of its boundary dilemma for the French. In 1685 he wrote: “It was believed for a very long time that domiciling the savages near our habitations was a very great means of teaching these peoples to live like us and to become instructed in our religion. I notice, Monseigneur, that the very opposite has taken place because instead of familiarizing them with our laws, I assure you that they communicate very much to us all they have that is the very worst, and take on likewise all that is bad and vicious in us.”109 Denonville complained in 1687 about the coureurs de bois who “every week marry Sauvage women in the manner of the Sauvages of that country.” He thought it important to “discipline our people, to regulate the [fur] trade in the rivers between our coureurs de bois, otherwise they will all become Sauvages and they will ruin our commerce.”110 Other officials complained: “The children of colonists get used to living like libertines like the natives, and even take up with the savage girls and women, even bringing them on hunts in the forests where they often suffer hunger so great that they eat their dogs.”111 The anxieties about this policy increased; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, some Jesuits, reflecting back on the seventeenth-century experience, expressed deep skepticism about the effects of assimilation. As one

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Jesuit wrote, “One should never mix good with the bad. The experience we have had in this country should set an example: all the French who have married a Sauvage woman have become libertines, becoming insufferably independent, not taking care of their children who were more lazy than the sauvages themselves. These marriages must therefore not be permitted.”112 Father Lamberville, who headed the Jesuits in France, implied in 1709 that the mixed marriages between the French and the Native Americans were responsible for France’s failure to populate its colonies. He observed that such marriages were prohibited in the English colonies and suggested that this accounted for England’s success in populating its colonies. He noted that henceforth the French authorities were quite vigilant in monitoring crossbreeding and were opposed to it. Ultimately, the dissolution of the boundaries led to the dissolution of the integrationist stance toward assimilation at the turn of the century.113

The Cultural Significance of the Nation’s Failed Political Policy France’s assimilation policy did not prove successful, and not many marriages were officially concluded.114 In fact, this policy was so unsuccessful that most historians even refuse to use the term “assimilation,” as I have already discussed. Nevertheless, the policy is important for purposes of grasping France’s emerging culture for three main reasons. First, the mere fact that the official ideal promoted intermarriage to form “one people” had a strong symbolic force. Second, the seventeenth-century French readers of the relations de voyage would not have known that the policy was a failure, as they did not have access to the information that is now available to modern scholars. Early modern readers probably assumed that the stories recounted in the relations were true. According to these accounts, many French men were in eager pursuit of marriageable Amerindian women. I have not encountered a single reference to a French man who refused an Amerindian woman in the relations. The opposite, however, was frequently the case: many Amerindian women refused their French suitors. The French were puzzled and distressed by this rejection. In one instance, the French governor and church delegates in Quebec visited the Tadoussac chief in 1636 to complain that “the Sauvages were not yet allied with the French by any marriage; and that it could easily be seen that they did not care to be one People with us.”115 The French governor was particularly distressed because this rejection was part of a long-standing pattern.116

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Like a spurned suitor, he took the defensive: “Not that we have need of your daughters or your children; we are as populous as the leaves of your trees. But we would like to see only one People in all this land.”117 Years earlier, Champlain had complained about the same situation. But in fact the French were in great need of Amerindian women as marriage partners—precisely because the French were so few. Given the supposed eagerness of the French men and the supposed desirability of a French husband, most French readers would probably have thought that intermarriage would soon be widespread. They would have assumed that the Amerindian women would soon succumb to French charm, no matter how recalcitrant they might be at first. Intermarriage seemed to loom on the horizon for an indeterminate future, even if it was not yet a reality. The third reason why assimilation and intermarriage are important for understanding France is that they represent a limit case, raising issues about the identity of Frenchness, since the nation’s boundaries were being stretched to allow for marriages with supposedly transformed cannibals. In addition to imagined official marriages, the relations reported many unofficial marriages, referred to as “mariages à la façon du pays” (marriages in the native fashion). These alliances challenged the “us-them” boundaries even more strongly because they meant that French men often lived in their wives’ households within their native communities and followed the behavioral practices of their spouses’ families rather than the reverse. Their children also took on Indian manners and modes of life, especially as many Indian families were matrifocal.118 These marriages and their familial arrangements followed the indigenous peoples’ traditional marriage rites, and distinct family units emerged.119 The opportunities for “mariages à la façon du pays” were particularly great because the French colonists were often in close contact with the indigenous peoples, as was the case from the very beginning of France’s colonial endeavors. When Jean de Léry wrote about his voyage to Brazil in 1555, he complained in particular about the truchements or coureurs de bois, who acted as go-betweens to facilitate French-Amerindian interactions. They were Frenchmen who learned the Native American languages of the tribes they encountered, moved into their villages, and lived among them. They adopted many or most Amerindian customs and practices, and cohabited with the women, often marrying them and having children with them. Léry described these sexual unions after complaining that in Brazil there were few women for the French men to marry. “Certain Normans, having escaped

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from a shipwreck . . . had remained among the sauvages, where, having no fear of God, they lived in wantonness with the women and girls. (I have seen some who had children by them already four or five years old).”120 The specter of these illicit unions lay beneath some discussions of marriage in the relations of the seventeenth century. Because intermarriage and an integrationist stance toward assimilation posed such a threat to the “us-them” boundaries, the church and the state re-conceptualized their colonial strategy in subsequent centuries, although they always adhered to some version of assimilation. Assimilation, especially in its “integrationist” seventeenth-century version, posed particularly serious boundary challenges because it required that the borders between self and other be crossed in order for the sauvages to “pass” as French Catholics, assuming that France’s identity would remain fixed and pure on its side of the divide. This colonial strategy was particularly dependent upon the resources of its culture to negotiate the dilemmas of the nation’s expansionist goal. Culture had important work to perform. First, the elements of French culture had to construct boundaries for the community. Culture was an appropriate choice because it was capable of imitation. As a boundary, culture was sufficiently elastic to accommodate outsiders. Had the nation’s boundaries been determined by the physiological or biological features of its members or by geographic location, France would not be able to expand to assimilate others. While the community had already defined its essence within expandable religious terms, the state came increasingly to emphasize the importance of culture to define and bind the nation together and it would function in analogous ways. Second, the function of culture was that it had to possess an authority whose magical power could rival that of Christianity. Its dazzling aura would support assimilation by causing the Amerindians to recognize the superiority of the French and stimulate in them a desire to be like the French. Third, France’s cultural authority over the Amerindians would change their hearts so they would not wish to create a hybridized mix of both worlds. The invisible boundaries created by this cultural authority would protect the identity and purity of the community since the Amerindians would melt into the mass of the French, Catholic community without seeking to affect it. The Amerindians would shed their differences to become the same as French, Catholics. But if the Amerindians could become like the French, the reverse was also true. The fear of backsliding haunted this colonial endeavor, just as it haunted the French humanist-educated elite because this anxiety tapped into

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the nation’s own cultural story about being the barbarian other to the Greeks and Romans. The fourth function of culture then was to serve as a barricade against such a regression, especially since the assimilation policy sought to dissolve “us-them” boundaries. In sum, assimilation, by definition, required the merging of the colonial and the cultural. The next part will examine the interweaving of the colonial and cultural discourses and how they shaped the nation’s cultural identity.

P a r t III

Weaving the Two Colonial Stories Together Escaping Barbarism

chapter 5

Interweaving the Nation’s Colonial and Cultural Discourses

Boileau explicitly introduced the New World sauvages into the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. In his notorious showdown with Perrault on the French Academy floor in 1687 (recounted in Chapter 1), Boileau engaged in a shouting match so violent that he lost his voice. His silence, however, lasted only a brief moment. He made a stinging comeback by penning a pair of epigrams attacking those who dared suggest that France’s cultured elite could dispense with imitation and forge a new, independent route to greatness. He compared Perrault and the moderns to the Hurons and the Tupinambas of the New World. This was a fear-mongering tactic, conjuring up what the nation’s men of letters would become if they failed to imitate the Ancients: they would regress into barbarism and become like the most primitive creatures on earth. Here is the first epigram: Clio came the other day to complain to the god of verse That in certain places in the universe One mistreated as poets sterile The Homers and the Virgils. That could not be true, they were mocking you, Apollo answered in anger Where did they say such a horrible thing? The Hurons? The Tupinamba profaned? —It was in Paris—Yes, but among the insane? No, it was in the Louvre, the Academy’s wing.1 125

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The second epigram read: I confess that these great critics Were no better than the Tupinambas Who, in antiquity were so insanely resentful, They loved all that was hated, defamed that which was beautiful; Today (between us), the Academy I see Suffers such great fools that It seems a bit Tupinamba too.2 At first glance, most scholars would probably dismiss Boileau’s comparison as a casual, gratuitous insult, not worthy of serious investigation. His slur might seem like a lone idiosyncratic voice because it clashes dramatically with the traditional paradigm that scholars have constructed for early modern French culture. That paradigm presents France’s cultural self-understanding as so selfcontained and self-confident that any significant connection to the nation’s colonial discourse seems implausible. In this context, Boileau’s insult sounds aberrant and absurd because it hangs in a void, at odds with the much-trumpeted official rhetoric about la grandeur de la France during this era. To suggest that civilized France feared regressing into barbarism and becoming like the most primitive people on earth thus does not ring true. However, such a fear was much more widespread and deeply rooted than the traditional paradigm would have us believe because the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses did in fact intersect. Often they were fused. As I will show, Boileau’s insult reflected a more generalized anxiety about backsliding into barbarism that had been festering ever since the start of the Quarrel in the sixteenth century, long before it exploded in the French Academy’s 1687 feud. Thus far, I have largely separated my analysis of France’s relationship with the Ancient World from that of the New World. In this part of the book, I now bring them together to show how both colonial stories converged to shape the development of elite French culture. This chapter serves as an introduction to the next three chapters, which form a unit, by demonstrating how Boileau’s insult opens a window to the triangulated dynamic of the nation’s emerging cultural identity, including both the New World and the Ancient World. I then reconfigure the Quarrel’s core dilemma within this triangulated frame. Boileau’s epigrams imagined a dynamic in which the Amerindians were a “them,” a primitive, negative force to be countered; the Ancients were an

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“us,” an advanced model to be emulated. Imitation constituted the best—the only—path to progress from barbarism to civilization. This triangulation is an unstated extension of the dominant cultural paradigm that scholars, following Norbert Elias’s formulation, have framed as a “civilizing process” (as I indicated in Chapter 1).3 But in articulating this narrative, most scholars have excluded the bottom segment from the picture because, in keeping with France’s official mythology, barbarism appeared either to have been eradicated or transcended. Or it seemed irrelevant because France’s artisans of glory represented the nation in an eternal present. Accordingly, this paradigm reduced the triangulated structure to a binary one in which only France and the Ancient World mattered. However, the third pole of barbarism was always present, exerting a strong force from below. Even when barbarism was not explicitly mentioned, it functioned as an implied point of reference. When Boileau included the New World within the Quarrel’s frame, he was drawing on a broader cultural/colonial discourse that was part of the nation’s cultural imperialism. This discourse connected the France/New World axis to the France/Ancient World dynamic. One of the most public and spectacular expressions of this narrative was staged during the three-day festival, known as Le Carrousel in 1662, that Louis XIV commissioned to celebrate the moment that he assumed his personal reign in 1661. This festival’s theme was a “Battle of Nations,” with five different nations in competition, each with its chief and ten chevaliers under him, all engaged in a series of tournaments and jousts. The first and central nation was Ancient Rome. France did not figure as an independent nation at all. Rather, it was fused with Rome. The French king, participating in this event, was dressed as the emperor of Ancient Rome, supposedly resembling this figure so fully that no differences separated them. The French king was the Roman emperor, as Jean-Marie Apostolides has emphasized: “Louis XIV is not the reincarnation of Augustus; nor is he the King of France wanting to imitate the Roman Emperor. He becomes Louis-Augustus, a new character projected into a different dimension, which associates the present with the past, and myth with history.”4 In this festival, France had mythically transcended the boundaries of time, space, and nation to become the Imperium Romanum. The Carrousel’s scenario tightened France’s identification with Rome as an “us” still further by having Rome/France engage in battle against a barbaric “them.” America, Turkey, Persia, and India figured as the four barbaric nations against which Rome/France was to fight. Each barbaric nation corresponded to an area of France’s major colonial interests in the 1660s when Louis XIV

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inaugurated a new phase of France’s colonial efforts.5 By virtue of developing its own colonial empire, France was demonstrating very concretely what it meant for the nation to become the New Rome and incarnate the Imperium Romanum. The term imperium had both a cultural and a political meaning, with culture and colonization working hand in hand. Because France’s cultural greatness was aligned with that of Ancient Rome, the nation had the right and the duty to both civilize and colonize the barbarians of its own world. Reciprocally, the fact that France was civilizing/colonizing the world’s barbarians signified the nation’s cultural greatness. The Carrousel festival glorified France’s civilizing/colonizing mission, dramatizing how France/Rome held up the torch of enlightenment for the world’s barbarians, all of whom were embarked on the same universal journey to civilization. In this imagined continuous journey, France was perched on high, existing in an eternal present, always already fused with the power of Ancient Rome, as Apostolides has noted. In fact, the nation’s identification with Rome as an “us” was so strong that it seemed as if France had never embarked on a journey to begin with. As an eternally great nation, it had no beginning. The staging of this festival made the Amerindians stand out from the other nations in two ways. First, America was anachronistic because this part of the world was unknown to Ancient Rome. Second, the festival’s iconography portrayed the Amerindians as the most extreme version of a “them,” more barbaric than the Turks, Persians, or Indians. Unlike their counterparts, the Americans were associated strongly with the animal world. Draped in animal skins, they were called “the sauvages of America,” according to Charles Perrault, who wrote the state’s officially commissioned report.6 Animals adorned the American king. His breastplate was made of dragon skin, with two heads meeting on the shoulders. A dragon crawled on his helmet, and a serpent wrapped itself around his baton.7 The king’s horses were clad in lion, leopard, and tiger skins.8 The American king, attended by bears and slaves with monkeys on their heads, wore a crown with the image of a lion bringing down a tiger. Similarly, the American nation’s heraldic emblem featured animals. By contrast, the representatives of Turkey, Persia, and India were dressed in silks and jewels, with no connections to the animal world. Their emblems pictured the sun, the moon, and the stars. The New World’s animal ornaments framed its inhabitants as a “them” at the furthest remove from France/Ancient Rome. And yet, despite their differences, the American sauvages were clearly

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already becoming assimilated into the French/Roman world. While their differences were pronounced, they were not significant enough to prevent the Americans from engaging in the festival’s highly disciplined, rule-oriented competitive games. Moreover, the festival’s commissioned engravings portrayed the Amerindians as a potential “us” with France/Rome by minimizing the Americans’ differences on a visual level. The “king of the Americans”9 had a face and body that resembled those of the French king/Roman emperor. The same was true of his clothes; seen at a distance, they blended in with those of the French king/Roman emperor, as if they were almost the same (figures 7 and 8). It is only when one reads the text of Perrault’s official account or examines the images in close detail that the differences between the two kings appear. Significantly, those differences existed only in things that could be changed: ornaments, horses, and devices. Their natural features, their physiognomy, did not reveal any significant variations. Their similarities dramatized that barbarians on the lowest rung of the continuum could transcend their primitive past by shedding their cultural differences. The festival thus echoed the story of the “extreme make-over” for the New World Indians discussed in Chapter 4. This festival dramatized a more idealized form of the assimilation policy, assuming that all parts of the world were potentially an “us” if they imitated the French/Roman models of civility. In sum, the same basic “us-them” triangulated dynamic lay beneath the surface of both the Carrousel festival and Boileau’s epigrams. Whereas the Carrousel had imagined France at the top of the continuum aligned with the Ancients, Boileau positioned it below the Ancients, fearing it did not yet merit such an exalted status. To be sure, Boileau aligned the French with the Ancients on the same side of an “us-them” divide. However, he assumed that these younger imitators did not yet measure up to their models. Thus, upon hearing Perrault’s poem, “The Century of Louis XIV,” which had dared suggest France had reached the top of the continuum, Boileau’s blood began to boil. He felt the need to bring his fellow writers down a few notches. But to where? Near the top? In the middle? Or sliding down that slippery pole toward barbarism? For many of the elite, such as Boileau, the question of France’s position on the continuum was tied to the issue of imitation. Because Boileau feared that France had not yet reached the top, its writers needed to imitate the Ancients to help them continue their progress. Correspondingly, to refuse the Greco-Romans as models was to regress back into the state of barbarism, toward the Amerindians. For Boileau, imitation offered the solution to the

Figure 7. Louis XIV as Roman emperor. From Charles Perrault, Courses de testes et de bague faittes par le roy et par les princes et seigneurs de sa cour, en l’année 1662. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 8. The “king of the sauvages.” From Charles Perrault, Courses de testes et de bague faittes par le roy et par les princes et seigneurs de sa cour, en l’année 1662. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Quarrel’s key question: how to defend France’s world of letters against the legacy of the nation’s barbaric past. While all the lettrés engaged in the Quarrel aspired to a cultural dignity and independence, they differed on the best path. They developed basically three different defense strategies, each of which revolved around the question of how to understand the nature of France’s differences from its Ancient models. Should the elite argue that they were essentially the same as the Ancients and seek to resemble them, while dismissing the significance of their differences? Or should they affirm the value of their differences and claim the superiority of those differences? Or should the elite construe the nation’s cultural identity outside of this binary opposition of sameness/difference? Each of the following three chapters develops a different defense strategy. The question of how to understand elite France’s differences from its Ancient models was central to the meaning and value of imitation as a proper defense strategy. Differences were a thorny issue because they had long been the mark of deficiency and sin, and ultimately connoted a form of barbarism. In our democratic, multicultural discourse of the twenty-first century, we largely view differences as less troubling because we situate them on a horizontal, nonhierarchical plane—or at least, that is the ideal. Early modern French discourse, however, looked at cultural differences through the lens of Platonism and Christianity.10 The Platonic notion of ideal forms and the Christian notion of an original unity posited that truth, faith, and the good were singular. Ideas, beliefs, practices, and customs were assigned value based on degrees of similarity to the ideal. Because only one true model of perfection and truth existed, all that differed from it signified imperfection, corruption, or defectiveness. The educated elite were particularly disturbed by the differences between their own world of letters and that of the Greeks and Romans. I contend that the problem of understanding the elite’s feared differences from the Ancients was more thorny than most scholars have realized. Certainly, many scholars have addressed the issue of differences. Thomas Greene, for example, demonstrated how many sixteenth-century writers feared their differences and bemoaned their slippage away from their supposed source in the remote, prestigious past of Ancient Greece and Rome.11 However, Greene understood this slippage as a sad loss attributable to impersonal, external factors: France’s historical distance from this past and a semantic drift in language. Both temporal and linguistic differences were the enemy; they made translating the exact meaning of Ancient texts difficult. This slippage caused many humanists to feel cut off and isolated from their professed source. For

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this reason, the humanist elite focused on philology to overcome the obstacles of history and language to construct a bridge back to the Ancients as their true source. Terence Cave has interpreted the problem of differences within a psychological rivalry between “father” and “son.”12 However, he saw their rivalry as a competition to communicate the same basic truths. Virtually all scholars, then, recognize some kind of rift. However, they downplay the power and significance of this division because they still see the French as “sons” to their Ancient “fathers.” While a father-son dynamic can be acrimonious, this interpretive frame still positions them all as members of the same “family.” In sum, most scholars have accepted one basic supposition: France’s humanists were aligned with the Ancients on the same side of an imagined divide; an essential bond united them as kin. I argue that the differences between the French elite and the Ancients resulted not simply from external, neutral factors or from a family feud. Their rift came from several sources. First, to state the obvious, there were more differences that separated the French from the Ancients than similarities that united them. Not only did France come into being many centuries later, but the French occupied a different geographical territory in a different part of the world, spoke a different language, had fundamentally a different religion, adhered to very different political and social systems, and had diverging cultural beliefs, customs, and values. Second, the French/Gauls and the Ancients were once on opposing sides of a colonial divide. Their rift inhered in the antagonism that was the legacy of the nation’s colonized past. As much as the nation’s official rhetoric portrayed the French as aligned with the Ancients in a dominant position of greatness, France’s men of letters found themselves slipping into the outsider position. This slippage caused many members of the elite to fear that France was not a wayward son but an alien creature outside the family circle. Beneath France’s self-confident rhetoric of kinship with the Greeks and Romans, its elite harbored a profound fear of difference—that their nation was the barbarian other. Third, this fear was exacerbated by France’s colonial relation to the New World barbarian. Unlike the nation’s dominant cultural discourse, its colonial discourse of the relations de voyage portrayed the Amerindians as constituting an “us” with the French. This similarity resulted from several different factors. It came from the negative effects of a “reverse influence” in which the French colonizers placed themselves at risk for becoming like the colonized, as discussed in Chapter 4. And this similarity also arose from the colonial discourse which imagined the Amerindians as kin to the French, fundamentally the

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same, but at a less evolved stage on the same continuum, as I will discuss in Chapter 7. Consequently, France’s differences from the Greco-Romans conjured up the specter of a greater kinship with the sauvages than with the Ancients. The status of France’s differences from the Ancients determined the meaning of imitation and its ability to help the nation journey to civilization. Its meaning varied depending upon the models being imitated, and the imitator’s implied relationship to those models, as Chapter 2 discussed. If the imitator viewed the model as an “us,” both sharing similar interests and ideals, then imitation was minimally fraught with anxiety, because it served as a civilizing process. But to the extent that the elite saw their models as a “them,” former colonizers bent on subjugating them, the imitation of these figures was much more perilous. Imitation placed the imitator at risk for repeating unwittingly the original colonial dynamic. This danger increased when the imitator forgot that the model was a colonizer, boasting a fundamental sameness despite the obvious underlying differences between them. The elite’s imitation of the Ancients was caught in a vicious circle since they struggled to escape the barbarism of their past by imitating modes of thought that implicitly viewed their ancestors/themselves as the barbarian other. Each of the next three chapters examines a different proposed escape route from this vicious circle. While each escape route mainly focused on France’s relationship to the Ancient World, this dynamic was mediated through the New World. But in each case, the triangulated path changed its course. In Chapter 6, I discuss the first escape route from barbarism. The elite denied the significance of their differences to insist on their supposed sameness with the Ancients. The chapter considers France’s educational system, which treated elite France as Ancient Rome, inhabiting the same lofty throne as if there were virtually no difference. French schools re-created a Romanized world that distanced their pupils from what was distinctly French. I show how this educational system paralleled France’s colonial policy toward the New World barbarian. This parallel raised the question of whether imitation was a civilizing process or a self-imposed colonizing process. While many lettrés had hoped that imitation was in fact a civilizing process, they found that this path only led back into the vicious circle because it treated the nation’s own language, history, and culture as barbaric. Chapter 7 examines the second escape route from barbarism, in which the elite adopted a more oppositional stance to the Ancients, but vacillated between seeing them as an “us” and as an imperial “them.” This path led to

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what scholars have labeled the “classical” ideal. While this escape route contributed to the greatness of the nation’s world of letters, it did not fully lead out of the vicious circle. France was still locked in a binary opposition of sameness/difference with the Ancient World, since it still accepted the GrecoRoman world view as its mental framework, but sought simply to reverse the positions of power and value. This chapter shows how the dominant cultural ideal mapped out a path that was shaped by both the New World sauvage and the Ancient World. Chapter 8 explores the third escape route, which finally broke out of binary opposition of sameness/difference with the Ancient World by using the concept of the sauvage and the New World as a lens through which to look at the Ancient World. The sauvage provided the foundation for a new logic that existed outside of the France/Ancient World polarity, ultimately reversing the slope of history by regarding France’s differences from the Ancients as an evolutionary advance over the past, not a fall from it. By making the concept of progress conceivable, this escape route became the path to modernity. Although I have deciphered three different escape routes out of the barbarism, they do not easily correlate with an ancient or a modern position. I thus invoke the terms “modern” and “ancient” only occasionally, as they do not always have a rational consistency that would make them meaningful. The positions of ancient and modern were not stable, nor were the writings of those authors who took stands on related issues. Nor can the three escape routes be correlated with any given chronological evolution. All of them were intertwined at the same moment, each often overlapping or slipping into the others. For this reason, I present these three escape routes thematically rather than chronologically and often return to the same authors in different chapters.

chapter 6

Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?

We keep our own tongue in slavery ourselves; We show ourselves foreigners in our own country. What sort of nation are we, to speak perpetually with the mouth of another? —Jacques Peletier, Art poétique (1555)

To civilize what he termed “barbarians” in France, Cardinal Mazarin left money and instructions after his death in 1661 to establish the Collège des Quatre Nations. The barbarians he had in mind were the inhabitants of the nation’s newly acquired regions. Louis XIV had conquered four new territories on the kingdom’s furthermost boundaries in 1648 and 1659: (1) Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, and Luxembourg; (2) Alsace and other Germanic territories; (3) Roussillon, Confluent, and Cerdagne; and (4) Pignerol and the Papal States. The collège brought sixty adolescents from those annexed regions to Paris to civilize and assimilate them into the nation. The founding document stated that the goal was to give them “a French education, and in imperceptibly inspiring in them the sweetness of our domination, it will erase in their hearts all the sentiments of a foreign affection. Recognizing the favorable treatment of our noble institution, they will engrave in their hearts the marks of a sincere and faithful love for our person and our State.”1 Mazarin’s educational theory was designed to “win their hearts and to make them truly French.”2 But what did it mean to civilize these barbarians and make them truly 136

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French? The French language, quite strikingly, was entirely absent from the school’s curriculum. Following Mazarin’s orders, the children were taught only in Latin and spoke to each other only in Latin.3 They heard French once a day—at mealtime when the students took turns reading aloud from Géraud de Cordemoy’s Histoire de la France.4 Otherwise, French history, literature, and culture were completely missing. The curriculum substituted a Romanized construction of the nation’s past for a French memory, teaching Roman history, literature, and culture. The “new history” that Pasquier, Popelinière, and others had proposed for France did not make its way into this school. Anything French was virtually absent from this education in Frenchness. In 1688, when the collège was actually built, the educated elite still preferred a Romanized Frenchness over a French Frenchness. I present this story about the Collège des Quatre Nations to illuminate the first path that the elite proposed to civilize their nation. Their path assumed that France’s differences from its Ancient models were marks of its deficiencies. To advance on the road to civilization, the nation had to imitate Ancient Rome, resemble and identify with it as fully as possible. This chapter begins by examining the curriculum and structure of French schools to explore the meanings and functions of imitation since the first proposed escape route from barbarism dictated a mimetic sameness. I focus on the nation’s schools for two reasons. First, schools shaped the elite’s most fundamental beliefs about the vernacular, the nation’s world of letters, and its emerging cultural identity. Second, the school constituted an important site where the nation’s cultural and colonial stories intersected since its educational program mirrored its colonial policy. Imitation played a similar role in both. This chapter presents the parallels between the nation’s educational/civilizing/colonizing process in France and in the New World to tease out the conflicting meanings implied within the imitative dynamic. How did imitation provide the path to civilization, helping to escape the haunting legacy of the nation’s own barbaric past? And how did imitation contain hidden dangers, creating a voluntary subjection and leading back into a vicious circle?

French Schools In excluding the nation’s native tongue, history, and culture from the curriculum, the Collège des Quatre Nations was far from anomalous. Most French schools

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followed a similar pattern, imitating the Ancient World by treating an education in Frenchness as if France were Rome. The dominant strain of the elite in France were not troubled by the exclusion of the nation’s native tongue, history, and culture, since they subscribed to the notion of a Greco-Roman universalism, which came out of a long-standing tradition of humanism. In this context, many members of the elite did not view Latin as necessarily other or alien. After all, it was the international language of the church. Moreover, it was the universal language of learning. French writers, wanting to be read by a worldwide community of scholars and thinkers, had to be able to communicate with that literate public, and Latin was the universal medium. Becoming educated and civilized meant acquiring humanitas. The word humanitas referred both to one’s quality as a human being and also to the learning of Ancient Greece and Rome. The two were intertwined because knowledge of classical antiquity would make one fully human. According to the humanist ideology, one cannot be fully human without cultivating the two gifts that separate humans from animals—speech and reason.5 In particular, the Greek language was viewed as the highest form of speech, giving access to right reason. Humanitas was a universalizing concept because knowledge of Greek and also Roman literature was deemed valid for all of humanity, summoning all to fulfill their highest human potential. Barbarism was due to the lack of such knowledge. In short, the French ancients believed that Greek and Latin were the universal languages of civilization, of faith, of power, and of humanity itself. Thus, for centuries the learned classes had preferred Latin over French. For example, Montaigne grew up learning Latin and did not speak French until the age of six. The servants in his household were highly trained in Latin and were instructed to make sure he did not utter a word of French. In short, because the ancients saw Latin as universal, they did not construe the Romans as other but saw them as an “us.” For these members of the elite, the Collège des Quatre Nations was consonant with French humanism, constructing Frenchness based on Latin, Roman history and culture. That such a view of education applied to the late seventeenth century might seem surprising because most scholars believe that humanism was dead or dying by the late sixteenth century. Most scholars further assume that by the seventeenth century the battle for the vernacular was essentially won and that the nation’s world of letters had achieved a place of pride among the cultured elite. However, I would argue that this was not entirely the case. A Greco-Roman universalism still prevailed in France’s educational system, where most of the nation’s elite were formed. Of course, the vernacular made huge advances as the seventeenth century

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progressed. France’s increasingly strong central government aggressively promoted the vernacular to build the nation’s greatness and prestige as a major European power.6 According to many scholars, the state began to use its own language as an instrument of social conformity.7 But even before then the vernacular had made major advances, the most significant occurring in 1539 when François I signed the famous Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterêts, which declared that French should replace Latin as the language for many official documents.8 A century later, Louis XIII passed the Code Michaud in 1629 to require that baptisms, marriages, and burials be registered in French.9 Despite these advances, the vernacular did not take hold as widely as most scholars have generally assumed. The vernacular had little place in the school system. The Collège des Quatre Nations’s scorn for the vernacular was typical of most schools, since Latin still overshadowed French up to the end of the seventeenth century. To substantiate this point, I will concentrate on schools run by the Jesuits, since their religious order controlled France’s educational system. Jansenist schools did value the vernacular, but they were a distinct minority.10 French schools identified the nation so completely with Ancient Rome that they expressly refused to teach the nation’s own language at all. Theoretically, they could have taught French in addition to Greek and Latin, but they strictly forbade it. The rulebook, the Ratio, stipulated that the professor had to speak Latin: “We will maintain, above all things and very strictly, the usage of speaking Latin. And we will never allow, in everything that regards the classroom, to use French. The master will speak continuously in Latin.”11 If the students dared speak any French, they were punished. The school authorities engaged an official whip master who specialized in punishing students who spoke French. The authorities set up a spy system to encourage students to inform on each other. Under Henry IV, the University of Paris established an educational policy which specified that “in every classroom there will be a monitor [surveillant] who will present the school head with a list of the schoolboys . . . who used the vernacular.”12 This official surveillance system ensured that no student spoke French. Students could never escape ever-watchful eyes. As one Jesuit priest put it: “A great number of prefects and other people who observe you will never lose sight of you. You will not make a single step without being observed, even in your bedrooms, your study halls, at church, at play, on walks, and in all your amusements, each one of you will be under the eyes of prefects, so that your behavior will be constantly watched day and night.”13 This spy system was entirely consonant with

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Foucault’s observation that “the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induced effects of power, and in which conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.”14 Not surprisingly, the prohibition against French caused some students to resent Latin. Charles Sorel wrote in his novel Histoire comique de Francion (1622): “I had a terrible regent, who always walked with a whip in his hand. . . . The hardest law for me to respect under his Empire was that one could not speak in any language other than Latin. I could not help myself speaking a word or two in my mother tongue: as a result I always received what was called the sign [le signe], which meant a punishment.”15 Le signe was a copper disk that the master gave to the first student he caught speaking French. This disk was like a hot potato that students were eager to get rid of. If they caught another boy in the act of speaking French, they had the right to pass it on to him. Thus they were always on the lookout for fellow culprits. The student left holding le signe at the end of the day was punished.16 This punishment was frequently the fate of Francion, Sorel’s character. Like Francion, many students at the beginning of the seventeenth century were increasingly rebelling against this suppression of their native tongue, which the school authorities found harder and harder to enforce. But the authorities, rather than yield to the pressure, redoubled their efforts and cracked down more severely.17 On the rare occasions when students did learn some French, they were never allowed to spend more than fifteen minutes a day on it. Moreover, the students were taught to pronounce their mother tongue with a Latin accent, not as they had learned it from their mothers with a pronunciation that came easily and naturally to them.18 Latin became the standard by which they experienced and judged their native tongue, setting norms that French, by definition, could never match. This disdain for the vernacular meant a corresponding disdain for the nation’s own literature and history, eliminating them as objects of study and of value.19 Corneille, Molière, and Racine were not part of the curriculum. Father Joseph Jouvency wrote: “As for these miserable modern books that slipped into the colleges, we must reject them and return to more pure sources.” A schoolteacher “must above all prevent himself from becoming too passionate about the works written in his mother tongue, especially by the poets who would make him waste most of his time, and even [threaten] his morality.”20 Racine, the great seventeenth-century French poet and dramatist, wrote to his

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son: “I beg you not to give too much attention to French poets. Think of them only as providing you with recreation and not constituting a true study.”21 When his son wanted to read a book in French, Racine advised him to turn to Herodotus translated into French. This self-deprecation went hand in hand with a deification of the Ancients, and French schools took repressive measures to instill these attitudes. France’s educational policy placed the Greeks and Romans on such a high pedestal that death could be the penalty for those who dared bring them down a few notches, at least theoretically. In 1624, the University of Paris obtained from Parliament an edict forbidding “any person, on pain of death, to either hold or teach any maxim against Ancient and approved authors.”22 The university sought to expel any professors who upheld opinions contrary to Aristotle. Descartes was condemned and excluded from the university because of his disrespect for the rule that the teacher “will not explain any book or any author outside the official list; he will not introduce any new method of teaching or debate.”23 Descartes was clearly out of step with such a program. France’s ideal education would civilize its students by detaching them completely from their native tongue and way of life, and then reattaching them to a Romanized world that was foreign to their everyday life. Thus, the boarding school (internat) became the highest and most prized form of education. Its most elite students, and certainly those entering the Jesuit Order, were internes; if the school also had day students, they were known as externes. The internat separated French children from their parents and home community to re-create a higher Romanized world where they spoke only Latin and read only about Roman history and literature. Cloistering them in this way would protect boarding school students from the supposed contaminating influence of their parents and their everyday French world. Only on rare occasions were students permitted to visit their parents, and then only for serious family matters. Vacations were kept to a bare minimum.24 Foucault has described the internat’s ideal as a closure; the school was structured like a monastery, with elaborate surveillance techniques.25 The internes were kept segregated from the externes, the day students. Father Jean Croiset warned the internes that when they heard Mass every day, they would be kept “in the congregation of pensioners, separated from outsiders and all those who do not have the same education as you.”26 The internat system allowed for an immersion method of teaching that took children away from their familiar, French way of life and placed them in a controlling environment, giving them no choice but to imitate everything Roman.

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In sum, the imitative dynamics of a French education were meant as a civilizing process, with pupils copying and identifying with Ancient Rome’s supposedly higher civilized world and detaching themselves from their own native tongue, customs, and culture. Imitation thus implied a devaluing of everything French, shunning it as barbaric and too particularized. This civilizing process mirrored the nation’s colonial strategy, as we will soon see in greater detail. When the “barbaric” children of France severed ties with their ancestral heritage to identify with the supposedly superior culture of a Roman universalism, they followed the same pattern of colonial assimilation to which the New World sauvages were subjected.

“Strangers in Our Own Land” Not all of the elite adhered to such a strict imitation of and identification with the Ancients. Some, whom I loosely label “moderns,” thought that imitation and its allied concept of the notion of a Greco-Roman universalism were oppressive and challenged their validity.27 They saw the schools’ civilizing process as an alienating process, or self-imposed subjugating process, that debased the nation’s world of letters as barbaric. As a modern, François Charpentier contested Latin’s universalism in the Battle of the Inscriptions, a smaller skirmish in the larger Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This battle centered on whether the monuments to honor the French king should be inscribed in Latin or in French. In his Défense de la langue française pour l’inscription de l’Arc de Triomphe (1676), Charpentier argued that to favor Latin because it was universal, and reject French as too particular, was a slap in the face of the nation. This rejection, he wrote, “creates a stain on our honor,” depriving the nation of “this right which it has merited.” To devalue French is to “dishonor a language which has been cultivated with such care by all its Kings, your predecessors,”28 by implying that the vernacular is weak and unworthy. Charpentier’s argument targeted the claim that the vernacular was “a very particular language.”29 His defense, however, did not lie in praising the virtues of the vernacular’s particularities. Rather, it lauded French as the new Latin. It was fast becoming universal, since many people in Asia, Africa, and the New World already knew it. “The French language is not confined within France’s boundaries. . . . Foreigners with ambition cultivate it” and speak it “wherever they go.”30 Although Charpentier then conceded that French was not yet universal

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and was still “inferior to the Roman,” he argued that Latin should not be preferred over French. Using the vernacular was a way to perfect it and thus make it universal in the future. Reminding his readers that Latin was once barbaric, Charpentier argued that the Romans had used their own language even when Greek was the universal medium of expression. During the first Punic War, two hundred years before Augustus, he wrote, the Romans vanquished the Carthaginians and constructed a monument to their victory. They inscribed their monument in “a semibarbaric Latin”31 that many critics “regarded as a Monster” because it “aped the Greek.”32 At that time, Greek was “in truth the universal language. . . . The whole kingdom of Naples spoke Greek. . . . It was the language of all civilized nations.”33 If the Romans had been ashamed to use their own language, fearing it was “powerless and poor,”34 they would never have cultivated it, and Latin would never have acquired the greatness and universal status it subsequently achieved. Charpentier attacked Latin’s universalism because it stunted the development of France’s own world of letters and wounded the nation’s pride. So long as they continued to imitate the Romans, the French would forever be perpetuating the fear that they were barbarians by treating their students as such. Charpentier lamented the exclusion of French from their own schools: “This great respect that one has for Latin is but a series of impressions that we are given in our youth, after we are forced to learn it in schools and one forbids us to use our own language.”35 In forbidding the use of French texts in the classroom, the schools deflated the nation’s aspirations, convincing their students that they were second best. France’s educational system implicitly treated its own students as barbarians. In forcing students to read Latin authors, wrote Charpentier, France’s schools “only leave us the freedom to applaud them.”36 Moreover, in encouraging French students to imitate the Ancients, French schools were teaching them to judge everything French according to an alien, Romanized set of standards that made their own language and world appear inadequate. The educated elite were taught to be “disgusted” (dégoustez) by the sound of French proper names, which seemed “dull and contemptible,” and they experienced the sounds of their own language as crude because “their ears are so sweetly flattered by Greek and Roman names.”37 Accustomed to hearing Greek and Roman names for so long, they felt that these foreign sounds were intrinsically nobler. But in fact their experience was simply a function of habit. The French language and French culture were not inherently defective. What was defective was the lens through which the French viewed their own world of letters, Charpentier argued. Schoolchildren

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were taught to compare the speech habits of all French people to those of the elite speakers of Latin. To judge the French that servants and coachmen spoke by the same standards as “the language of the Scipios and the Caesars” was not appropriate.38 No wonder many French feared their language was inadequate. They had a distorted sense of their own world of letters because they viewed themselves through a borrowed, Romanized lens.39 This lens was out of focus, not adjusted to value France’s differences from Rome. When “one sees from afar a great city of which only sees the high towers, the tops of palaces and the domes of temples, one surmises from this first appearance that everything is beautiful and magnificent; but once inside one no longer notices anything but the narrow muddy streets and a confusion of cluttered, poorly built houses, and one wonders sometimes where the city they had seen has gone.”40 The French educated elite needed a readjusted French lens to help value their own accomplishments and experience. Imitation damaged the French soul, causing a profound otherness to emerge at the core of France’s budding cultural identity. In De l’excellence de la langue française, Charpentier expressed fears that France’s civilizing process was an alienating process when he complained: “Must one . . . seek in a foreign language the words to express happiness, and must one use a mouth other than one’s own?”41 To become educated and civilized meant to become far from oneself. The nation’s educational process encouraged French children to reject the language in which they expressed naturally their most fundamental desires and needs. This process distanced French children from their first and natural self. Imitating Ancient Rome’s supposed universal culture fostered a self-disdain. Charpentier’s complaints were not anomalous; they existed in a long line of writers before him who sensed that imitation was, perhaps unwittingly, a self-imposed form of subjection to an alien culture. As early as the sixteenth century, some intellectuals argued that the French should not bow down to Latin in the name of its universalism. In the realm of law, Etienne Pasquier had urged that French jurists should free themselves of this “superstitious servitude in which we subject our minds according to ancient laws” of the Romans.42 Constantly referring to the Romans as foreigners, Pasquier suggested that Rome’s supposed universalism did not and could not speak for the French. In a letter to M. de Tournebu, a professor of Greek at the University of Paris, he wrote: “What? We will carry the name of Frenchmen, that is to say, of frank and free men, and nevertheless we will subjugate our minds to a foreign word!”43 For Pasquier, Roman universalism was a false universalism

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that camouflaged its dominating intent. In the same spirit, the poet Jacques Peletier had warned of the dangers of a borrowed discourse that did not honor one’s own experience. In Art poétique (1555), Peletier wrote that if a poet engages in such borrowing, “nothing will be said of him except that he speaks with the mouth of another, by rote and in debt.”44 To speak in a borrowed tongue constituted a self-chosen bondage: “We keep our own tongue in slavery ourselves; we show ourselves foreigners in our own country. What sort of nation are we, to speak perpetually with the mouth of another?”45 Peletier feared Latin was a language that distanced oneself from one’s heart, preventing France’s poets from having the kind of expressive power that comes with the language one imbibed from one’s mother’s milk, as it were. The literary critic Richard Waswo has observed a similar tension, demonstrating how this line of argumentation was inspired by the Italian Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue (1542).46 A disputant in Speroni’s dialogue argued that the vernacular had a greater expressive power than Latin, since the greatest emotional power comes from the language we learn “della bocca,” not from school or formal study. Imitation made the French foreigners in their own land, wrote the seventeenth-century educator and historian Charles Rollin. He argued that the effects of putting Latin at the center of a French education harmed the nation’s pride. They made the nation’s children strangers to their everyday world, forced to inhabit a Roman world that was not their own. By promoting an alien tongue, France’s pedagogical strategy was cultivating a self-alienation. Rollin complained that the current educational goal was to “transport [the students] to other countries in other times.”47 Criticizing the absence of French history from the curriculum, Rollin wrote: “Without it we will always remain in a type of childhood that will leave us strangers with regard to the rest of the universe.”48 Emphasizing that the Romans were not an “us,” he continued: “I am ashamed to be, in a sense, a foreigner in my own homeland, after having traversed so many other countries.”49 Bemoaning the alienating effects of an education that rejects its own history, he argued: “It would not be reasonable to only occupy oneself with the study of Greek and Latin authors and not be curious to discover the writers of one’s own country, [so that] young people always remain strangers in their own country.”50 The French educational system was forming young pupils who did not even know their own history. On the practical side, several pedagogues argued that imitation was not conducive to true learning. To have an education taught in Latin made learning seem unnatural and less accessible. Pierre Coustel, in Règles de l’éducation

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des enfants (1687), argued that lessons should be taught in French because children who learn subjects in their mother tongue “will understand with much less difficulty what they read in this language than in another of which they still have no idea.”51 Similarly, Thomas Guyot complained in 1666, “Is it not more natural to use that which they already know [French] to teach them than that which they do not know?”52 Logically speaking, it would seem easier for students to learn in a language they had already mastered. For the Jesuits, however, the unnaturalness of education in Latin was precisely the point. Its unnaturalness would make the students more humble and dependent on their schoolmasters, reminding them of their ignorance and insufficiency. The instructors could thus command greater authority and respect.53 The fight over the vernacular was ultimately the legacy of Rome’s colonial expansion and its universalist ideology. Latin had become a universal language because the Romans had imposed their language by force on the Gauls and many others. Language was a handmaiden of servitude; Latin was an instrument and mark of colonial subjection. Let us recall the passage from Dominique Bouhours that I quoted in Chapter 2: “As soon as the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls, the Roman language began to be used there, either out of the complaisance of the conquered, or because it was necessary and in their best interest; be it because they were subjects who had no access to their masters without some fluency in Latin, or be it because the Roman decrees were all written in Latin. Little by little Latin gained ground and the Romans imposed the yoke of their language, along with servitude, upon the conquered, as Saint Augustine writes.”54 The fact that the French elite still spoke Latin was the all-too-visible mark of France’s past as a colonized people. Scipion Dupleix, in Mémoires des Gaules (1619), reminded his readers that the French had come to speak Latin and value it over their native tongue because of the nation’s colonized past: “All the Gauls, having been subjugated and reduced into provinces by the Romans, learned Latin and began to compose all acts in Latin.”55 As a direct consequence of this colonial history, Latin became the official language for all French administrative and juridical documents. The universalism of Roman culture and language thus went hand in hand with colonial domination. The quarrel over the vernacular brought back the memory of the nation’s shameful past as a colonized people, as Merlin-Kajmann has shown.56 For this reason, many moderns rejected Latin’s universalism, fearing that to imitate their former colonizers was to unwittingly reenact the original colonial dynamic.

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Clearly, the nation’s schools provided a key site for the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. The meaning of imitation was shaped by the enduring legacy of Roman universalism. The ancients prevailed on this battlefield, with the dominant educational system viewing Ancient Rome as an “us.” It presumed that Roman history was akin to French history and that Rome was akin to France. Given this strong identification, the ancients believed that imitating the Romans would help their journey to civilization, providing the nation with the best escape route from barbarism. Although the moderns lost on the battlefield of the schools, their recessive voice about education expressed a revealing note of opposition. They saw the true danger inherent in imitation. French schools distanced their own children from their native culture and subordinated France to an imperial other. In imitating the Romans, France’s school system taught its own students to identify with a Romanized world and cut their ties to their native culture, thus identifying against a French Frenchness. Treating its own children as barbarians, the schools were duped into viewing imitation as a civilizing process, whereas imitating a Romanized world of thought was really an alienating process. Worse, it was a self-imposed subjugating process that internalized the Greco-Roman values, deprecating France’s own world of letters. The schools shrank the nation’s pride in its own cultural heritage and stunted the French soul by forcing the elite to become foreigners in their own land. Far from being an “us,” the Romans were an imperial “them” who had used their culture and their ideology of universalism as a tool of colonial domination. Even though their Roman masters were dead, their domination continued beyond the grave. French masters took their place and cracked the whip—both literally and figuratively—all in the name of civilization. The French educational program thus voluntarily reenacted a version of the Roman colonial and cultural assimilation. Accordingly, imitation did not offer an escape from barbarism but led back into the bind of the nation’s colonized past.

The Gallic Hercules: Imitation and France’s Cultural/Colonial Story The conflicting meanings of imitation were also present in the famous image of the Gallic Hercules which straddled the nation’s cultural/colonial story. This imaginary figure featured Hercules with a chain fastened to his tongue.

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The chain was attached at the other end to his listeners’ ears, enticing a mass of people to follow him voluntarily (figure 9). This image represented France’s eloquence; Hercules’ words had the persuasive force of chains. Scholars typically analyze this important figure within a purely cultural context as an emblem of the nation’s struggle for the vernacular. Highlighting the importance of Hercules’ tongue, scholars have shown how this image encouraged France’s kings and its world of letters to cultivate a distinctively French eloquence capable of shaping the hearts and minds of the masses, just as the Romans had learned to do.57 Accordingly, this figure became an instrument of monarchic propaganda, symbolizing France’s cultural greatness as well as its wise and effective governance under François I, Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV.58 Scholars believe that this figure first emerged in France with Geoffroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529). The chains attached to the Gallic Hercules’ tongue suggests a colonial context for his eloquence. Although he had bulging muscles, he did not rely primarily on physical force; his words took their place, chaining his listeners to him through a seductive force. Tory insisted that the chains were voluntary because they were more ornamental than coercive: “The links were of small gold and amber chains that were beautifully made,”59 and they did not physically force the crowd into subjection. The people voluntarily chose their chains because they were “beautifully made,” like France’s eloquence. These “small gold and amber chains” led the people along much like the pied piper did.

Figure 9. The Gallic Hercules. Printed in Geoffroy Tory, Champ Fleury. Paris, 1529. Courtesy of the British Library.

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The crowd was willingly “pulled and led, although there was not a one who wanted to break away, which they could have easily done, had they so wanted. They did not pull back at all, and did not drag behind but all happily and joyfully followed him, enchanted by him. They all of their own free will hastened to follow him.”60 In following the Gallic Hercules, the crowd embraced the chains they thought led to civilization. Tory championed the image of a Gallic Hercules to suggest that if the French cultivated their own language, it could have the same power to seduce and control others by inducing a “voluntary subjection.” Although Tory did not use this exact term, his description of the chains clearly implied this meaning. Lescarbot, however, would later use this phrase to describe the role of imitation in the nation’s New World colonial strategy, as we will see shortly. Tory admired the Romans for creating a voluntary subjection through their culture, used as an instrument of domination. He observed that there were two kinds of power, one cultural and the other military. The first was more important than the second: “The Romans, who have dominated the greatest part of the world, have prospered and obtained more victories by their language than by their lance.”61 The Romans engaged in a “soft” approach to colonization by cultivating their language and arts as magnets to attract outsiders. Non-Romans, perceiving their own inferiority, would voluntarily imitate the Romans and cast aside their former ways to become like their chosen models. Identifying with and imitating this Roman strategy, Tory proposed that the French develop their vernacular for similar expansionist purposes, enticing the masses, both inside and outside of France, to follow them of their own free will. In cultivating a distinctively French eloquence and culture, the nation would entice the masses of the world to follow its notion of civilization, just as the Romans had done for the Gauls. But where do the French fit into the picture of the Gallic Hercules? Certainly, the name itself and the dominant interpretation suggest that France was Hercules, reflecting the French admiration for the Romans and their strategies of domination. But some men of letters realized that the positions could be reversed, placing France in the position of the chained masses. As much as Tory admired the Romans, he also resented them, as Chapter 1 has described, for having duped the Gauls into a voluntary subjection through the seductive power of their culture. Such duplicity was a trick for which Tacitus had famously mocked the Britons, who were duped into mistaking their servitude for signs of civilization.62 Similarly, Scipion Dupleix in Mémoires des Gaules ranted against the Romans’ cultural deception, dominating the Gauls through

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their dazzling eloquence. Because the Gauls longed to be like the Romans, they were enticed into a voluntary subjugation, caught off guard because they did not recognize the dynamic as a colonial subjugation. Dupleix puzzled over the Gallic Empire’s strange demise. It was once so vast and powerful that it had colonies all over Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Gauls were “magnificent, superb, victorious, conquerors of the most warlike nations: the Italians, the Spanish, the English, the Hungarians, Slaves, Scythes, Macedonians, Bithynians, Syrians, and even the Greeks and Romans who had conquered others.” So fearsome were the Gauls that “the mere mention of the name Gaul made the Romans tremble.”63 And yet the Romans defeated the Gauls, destroying everything in only nine short years. How was this possible? Dupleix explained it: the Romans deceived the Gauls, conquering them “through friendship and kindness or by subterfuge and artifice, not by arms and open force.”64 To “win the hearts”65 of the Gauls, the Romans employed various ruses, such as promoting some Gauls to the Senate. But these were just tricks to create an illusion of inclusion and respect. The ploys worked, since the Gauls failed to see the Romans as colonizers and were deluded by the false promise that the initial boundaries between colonizer and colonized would dissolve. After the Gauls gave up their independence, they realized they had been duped. Their supposed friends were colonizers in disguise who disdained them. Suetonius and others viewed them as “semibarbarians.”66 As much as Dupleix admired the Romans and ultimately sought to become like them, he also resented them. It was as if the Romans had employed their own version of a Herculean figure with chains, seducing the Gauls with their sweet-sounding eloquence and culture to strap on their own bonds. Jean Savaron, in Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement des rois et de l’Etat (1611), also pointed to the dangers of imitation. In general, he praised the Romans for using cultural seduction as a method of force. But occasionally he slipped into angry moments when he identified with the Gauls on the receiving end of the Roman civilizing/colonizing process. Resentful of the Romans for using their letters as a deceitful ploy, he wrote: “Julius Caesar and the Roman subterfuge had conquered the Gauls by the appeal of their letters and by the specious titles of honor” rather than by force of arms.67 In a flash of anger, Savaron saw that the Roman’s civilizing mission was a colonizing mission and that the Gauls had been deceived into fabricating their own voluntary chains under the guise of imitation. Of course, his anger was directed not at the Romans, who were dead, but at the French elite, since Savaron feared that their current imitation of the Ancients might be perpetuating the same

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old dynamic. But this fear faded (although never completely) under the elite’s strain to identify with the position of power—that of Hercules himself. Imitation, then, could function as a voluntary subjugation. The French elite wanted their culture to produce a similar effect, even though they resented the Romans for precisely this deception. More than a century and a half after Tory, Charpentier also invoked the Gallic Hercules to suggest that French eloquence, if properly cultivated, could induce a voluntary subjection in others. In Défense de la langue française pour l’inscription de l’Arc de Triomphe (1676) Charpentier praised the voluntary chains that Hercules wove out of his words. Hercules “had several chains of gold and precious stones coming out of his mouth, by which he held on to an infinite number of people who were attached by their ears, so that they seemed to follow this Hero of their own free will, rather than by necessity since the chains were so light and easy to break.”68 These chains were “a symbol of the nation’s genius,” wrote Charpentier.69 Its genius was, in part, to stimulate others to imitate France, voluntarily subjecting themselves to the nation’s cultural power. Like Tory, Charpentier admired the Romans for using their arts and letters to “bend the hearts [of outsiders] by the charms of discourse.”70 The French language and arts could charm foreigners and colonize their souls, inducing outsiders to voluntarily impose colonization on themselves. Thus French culture, like its Roman model, functioned surreptitiously as a covert civilizing/colonizing strategy. Taking place with the elegance and refinement that has come to be France’s hallmark, colonization would appear to be an act of love, not domination. The spirit of the Gallic Hercules was behind France’s cultural imperialism, dominating the nation’s world of letters even when this specific image did not appear. Bouhours’ best-selling Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671) was a fantasy of a “soft colonization,” with France dominating the world through its arts and letters.71 Bouhours’ text celebrated France’s cultural power—it acted like a magnet that compelled people everywhere to bang at the nation’s gates, clamoring to be part of France. Like moths to a flame, foreigners were drawn by the light of France, whose language was fast replacing Latin as the universal language: “All foreigners who have any spirit are proud to know the French language . . . there are hardly any countries in Europe where French is not understood.” To emphasize the universalism of French, Bouhours insisted that it “is in current use among the sauvages of America and among the most civilized nations of Asia.”72 The king of Persia, eager to promote commercial relations with France, insisted that “the Persians study French with an incredible ardor. I suspect that the Chinese and Japanese also study it since there are French

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people among them. . . . If the French language is not yet the tongue of all people in the world, it seems to me that it deserves to be.”73 Foreigners learn French willingly, writes Bouhours, “almost as soon as their own, out of a secret instinct that warns them that despite themselves one day they will obey the King of France, accepting him as their legitimate master.”74 Once they learn French, they “neglect their natural language entirely and pride themselves in never having learned it.”75 Bouhours imagined the day when “all languages would be reduced to one.”76 Of course, that language would be French, so that “all people could communicate and understand each other in the way we do.”77 French would provide the thought structures through which all peoples would understand themselves. French culture dominated by insinuating itself into the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world, acting on their feelings, restructuring their souls so they would identify with the French, not with their ancestral heritage. While Bouhours framed this soft colonization as the natural effect of France’s superior culture, it was not as naturally occurring as he made it appear. The French state was behind the scenes, pulling the strings to make such an effect seem natural. When the state founded the French Academy, it was, in part, with such a colonizing goal in mind. It sought to work on the hearts and minds of the people around the world, drawing them into a voluntary subjugation. Nicolas Faret’s Projet de l’Académie pour servir de préface à ses statuts (1634) described the desired effects of the French language on foreigners. “Tempted by their love” for the French language, foreigners “conceive a secret desire to abolish theirs in order to speak only French.”78 Similarly, Paul Pellisson-Fontanier’s official Histoire de l’Académie Française argued that its goal was to make “foreigners . . . enamored of the language they have hitherto disdained.”79 This language of love and desire suggests that the Academy imagined that French culture could seep into the souls of people the world round, making them beg to become French. The French Academy wanted France to become the “master of hearts” of the whole world, just as in Corneille’s Cinna the emperor Augustus realized that true power resided in his making himself the “master of hearts” of those in his empire. The French state developed its arts and culture as a self-conscious strategy with this imperialist agenda in mind. It began with seduction, creating a public culture so dazzling and prestigious that all subjects would imitate it, and it would confer prestige on those associated with it.80 Louis XIV built Versailles, the largest single construction project undertaken in Europe since Roman times, to command the adulation of the world. Similarly, his

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development of culture, from extravagant festivals and spectacles, to theatrical events, ballet, opera, music, and poetry, was designed to gain the attention of foreigners everywhere. In 1663, he founded the Petite Académie, whose goal was to fashion France’s image. To create an aura of magic that would attract public attention, Louis XIV founded more academies and cultural institutions than any other king in French history: L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648), L’Académie de Danse (1661), L’Académie Française de Rome (1666), L’Académie des Sciences (1666), L’Académie de Musique (1669), and L’Académie Royale d’Architecture (1671).81 In 1680, he established the Comédie-Française. Louis XIV furthered this notion of a dazzling, universal culture by transforming everyday activities into ritualized forms of art. For example, France’s haute cuisine originated as part of this impulse in the kitchens of Versailles. In addition, Louis promoted France’s modes of dress and manners, and of course language, as highly visible, supposedly imitable signs of the nation’s superior civilization. To imitate them marked its imitators as “civilized.” Membership in this universalizable group would bind people together. Just as advertisers today sell commodities by giving them sex appeal, the French state endowed its culture with a prestige appeal, a magical aura—a certain “je ne sais quoi.” So we see that France’s cultural story about imitation was also a colonial story. The nation’s obsession with cultivating its own world of letters had two different but related goals. The first was to break the chains and de-colonize from the continuing legacy of the Ancient World and its supposed universalism. The second was to fabricate a similar set of chains to colonize the New World and the other barbarian nations, universalizing French cultural and political influence to become precisely what the French hated in a Greek and Roman universalism. The nation’s newly forged chains would be all the more compelling precisely because they hid what the French were really doing. French culture would seduce others into a love affair, its dynamics propelled through a naturally occurring imitation, deemed a civilizing process. But behind it was a colonizing strategy that the French had learned from the Roman colonization of Gaul. Rollin had admired the Roman strategy that “attached the Gauls by such powerful and voluntary bonds that they were never tempted to break them.”82 Imitating this Roman strategy, the early modern French elite hoped that their emerging culture could stimulate a similar effect of a voluntary imitation/subjugation in others. French universalism would replace a Greco-Roman universalism, repeating the scenario that had oppressed the nation’s own world of letters, but reversing the positions of power.

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Imitation as a Voluntary Subjection: The Colonial Story Imitation figured importantly in the colonial discourse of the relations de voyage, promoting both a subjugating/colonizing process and a civilizing process, which were clearly two sides of the same dynamic. Marc Lescarbot,83 who went on an expedition to Acadia to support the ideals of the Catholic Reformation, characterized imitation as a “voluntary subjection” in his Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, published first in 1609 and then in 1611−12 and again in 1617−18: “The sauvages came from all around to see the manners of the Frenchmen, and lodged themselves willingly near them: they made Monsieur de Mons judge of their debates, which is a beginning of a voluntary subjection, from whence a hope may be conceived that these people will soon conform themselves to our manner of living” (my emphasis).84 Lescarbot’s observation buttressed what the theorist Homi K. Bhabha would later observe about imitation in France’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial policy: “Mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.”85 Anticipating Bhabha’s analysis by several centuries, Lescarbot, and the relations more broadly, illuminated the elusive nature of France’s colonial strategy. Father Claude d’Abbeville also described France’s colonial mission in Brazil through a similar concept of a voluntary subjection but employed another oxymoronic phrase. For him, the Tupinambas were “sweetly forced” to give themselves freely to the French, seduced into imitating the French because of their superior, dazzling modes of life. The Tupis were “newly conquered not by arms, but by the Cross, not by force, but by love, which has so sweetly forced the Indians to give themselves and their country to the King of France, so that after having planted the Cross themselves as a sign that they want to be the children of God, they also planted our nation’s coat of arms in the middle of their land so that others will recognize that of all the Nations of the world, our very Christian King is the sovereign master and peaceable possessor [of their land]; such is the right of the King of France and of Navarre, who by all laws is also the King of the Indians or rather of Equinoctiale France” (my emphasis).86 The “sweetness” of France lay in its wise mode of governance. On the same trip as d’Abbeville was Admiral Razilly who published the Tupi chief ’s words to him in the Mercure François: “Your kindness, your sweetness, and your ways show that you will govern us wisely. The Tupis have never obeyed force or violence. Since I have taken command over them, I have found that sweetness rules them best. I hope (great warrior) that you will do the same; the sweet conversations we have had with the French for the past few years make

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us believe that you will do so” (my emphasis).87 The Amerindians’ supposedly pushed their imitation of French Catholic culture one step further: they begged the French to exert political and religious dominion over them. Voluntarily and eagerly, they bestowed on the French the right to rule over them. The relations dramatized the Amerindians’ voluntary subjection by giving them a voice in which they directly expressed their desire to be part of France’s world. For example, Samuel de Champlain put the following words in the mouth of a Huron chief in North America who welcomed the French into their land to teach them how to be like the French: “If you would do us the favor to come live in our country and bring your wives and children, and when they are here we shall see how you serve this God who you adore and how you live with your wives and children, how you cultivate and plant the soil, how you obey your laws, how you take care of animals, and how you manufacture all that we see proceeding from your inventive skill.”88 Similarly, in Razilly’s account in the Mercure François, the Tupi chief supposedly articulated France’s colonial ideal as their own: “Our hope is that our children will learn the law of God and your arts and sciences. This hope makes us believe that in the future others will think us French.”89 According to this account, the Tupi chief, Bourouuichaue, said his people loved the French, and “that is why we beg you to tell us your will, so that we can follow what you order.”90 The fact that the colonized often articulated France’s colonial dynamic created the illusion that the Amerindians consented to colonization, viewing it as selfimprovement, a civilizing process. Colonization, then, was a love story. Imitation played a central role within it, which began with the seemingly natural desire of the Amerindians to imitate Catholic France’s superior world. According to the Jesuit Relations, the Hurons were on bended knees, pleading with the French to free them from ignorance, “asking help and uttering the word of that Macedonian to Saint Paul, Transiens in Macedoniam adjuva nos; ‘Come, help us, bring into our country the torch which has never yet illuminated it!’”91 “They are already tired of their miseries and are opening up their arms to us for assistance.”92 For Lescarbot, the American Indians “one and all love the French, and desire nothing more than to conform themselves to us in civilization, morality and religion.”93 He writes of “the peoples of the west, who of their own will give us their lands and now for a hundred years have been holding out their hands to us.”94 In return, the French felt love and charity toward them, eager to help them to “conform themselves to our manner of living.” Because colonization appeared as a love story, the accounts in the relations

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do not appear, on the surface, to be about a colonizing process. And because the Amerindians’ imitation was supposedly voluntary, leading to their selfimprovement, France’s dominating, colonial dynamic was muted. Imitation hid this dynamic through a phenomenon that appeared natural, making it an “elusive and effective strateg[y] of colonial power and knowledge,” as Bhabha has claimed. That imitation should play such a pivotal role in colonization might seem odd at first glance. But it is important to keep in mind that the French model of colonization differs significantly from the more standard image that most people typically conjure up when they think of colonization. The standard strategy assumes a top-down dynamic in which a colonizer imposes its will on the colonized through military muscle. Acting contrary to the desires of the colonized, the colonizer forces them to submit to a hateful, demeaning way of life. But contrary to this model, the French portrayed their nation’s colonial endeavors as a bottom-up dynamic in which the colonized eagerly sought to become like the colonizer. This notion of colonization was particularly dependent on the resources of culture to set a mimetic dynamic in motion. The term “culture” originally referred to the cultivation of the earth, as in agriculture. However, this term began increasingly to refer to humans in the late seventeenth century. I thus understand the term “culture” first in the agricultural sense of preparing outsiders (understood as plants) to enter the garden of Catholic France’s civilized community. Culture thus had to transform the souls of outsiders when they imitated the elements of French culture, thus enabling them to resemble insiders. As David Spurr reminds us, culture and coloniziation are historically and etymologically related— both derive from the Latin colere: to cultivate, to inhabit, to take care of a place.95 The Latin colonus designated both a farmer or a husbandman and a member of a settlement of Roman citizens or colonia, in a hostile or a newly conquered country, while cultura referred both to tilling the soil and to refinement in education and civilization. Second, I use “culture” to refer to the imitable social practices and material objects that characterized what it meant to be an insider in France’s imagined, civilized community. These practices can be daily habits, beliefs, customs, or material objects such as food, clothing, or lodging, or they can refer to the arts and letters of an elite world—literature, music, painting, and so on. These practices defined the bounds of the civilized world beyond which barbarism reigned. (I do not mean to suggest that France had a clearly defined notion of culture at

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this time. Rather, its culture was evolving, in part, to negotiate the colonial dilemmas the nation faced at this time.) The key dilemmas that culture had to navigate revolved around the nation’s boundaries. Because culture was something that outsiders could imitate, it was charged with defining the boundaries of the community. Had those boundaries been determined by fixed physiological, biological, or geographic factors, the nation would not have been able to expand in the same way. While a cultural imitation enabled outsiders to be included, it also had to perform a contrary function: to protect the original purity and identity of the community from the outsiders it was including and also to unify them into a coherent whole. To negotiate these conflicting needs, French culture had three main tasks to perform. The first was seduction. The nation’s culture had to have a “sweetness” to lure the Amerindians into wanting to imitate it. An underlying dynamic of attraction and repulsion would cause the Amerindians to be drawn into the French world and shun their own. The Amerindians, we read in the Jesuit Relations, “will become so accustomed to our food and our clothes, that they will have a horror of the Sauvages and their filth. We have seen this exemplified in all the children brought up among our French.”96 Seduced by the inherent desirability of the French way of life, the Amerindians would want to cross the boundary. “I know none amongst them who do not prefer in sickness the poorest house of the French to the richest Cabin of the Savages. When they find themselves in comfortable beds, well fed, well lodged, well cared for, do you doubt that this miracle of charity will win their hearts?”97 The relations’ stories presented the assimilationist ideal as emerging out of the effects of French culture as objects of love and desire, stimulating the Amerindians to imitate it. An imitative dynamic appeared as a naturally occurring phenomenon since, as the Jesuit Relations portrayed it, the Amerindians were like “little monkeys, . . . they imitate everything they see done.”98 Writing about their supposed mimicry, Father Le Jeune observed that “it may be believed that, since the foundations of this new world were laid, they had never had any processions, but as they see some [French processions] from time to time, they have commenced to form their own in their fashion.”99 Imitation was so central to France’s colonizing strategy that the French observers projected an imitative dynamic onto the American Indians, even when it is clear to us in the twenty-first century that these sauvages had their own customs, which did not imitate the French. Describing their dress, Father Paul Le Jeune observed:

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“The men, when it is a little warm, go naked, with the exception of a little piece of skin which falls from just below the navel to the thighs. When it is cold, or probably in imitation of the Europeans, they cover themselves with furs of the Beaver, Bear, Fox, and other animals of the same kind, but so awkwardly that it does not prevent the greater part of their bodies from being seen.”100 Le Jeune saw the Amerindians as acting “in imitation of the Europeans” because it was inconceivable that they had an independent set of customs. The degree to which the Amerindians imitated the French became the yardstick for measuring their progress. For example, Father Barthelémy Vimont told what he considered a charming story of imitation: a young Huron girl began to cry when a Frenchman briefly touched her hand to help guide her along a treacherous path in Quebec. Her friends, witness to this act, gasped in horror. Through her tears, the young girl reproached the Frenchman: “I have washed my hands so often that it is impossible that anything can remain of the harm that [you] may have done me.”101 The girls had interpreted the Frenchman’s touch to mean he had snatched her virginity from her. Father Vimont chuckled: “Such innocence is most amusing.”102 He was referring to his assumption that these girls misunderstood the baffling new concept of virginity. This Jesuit observer interpreted the girls’ reactions as shame, reflecting their imitation of French, Catholic behavior.103 His story addressed the stereotypical notion that Amerindian girls were promiscuous, which had become a topos in France’s travel literature.104 Even if the girls did not yet quite understand the concept of virginity, which they were purportedly imitating, they would figure it out over time because “mind is not lacking among the Sauvages of Canada, only education and instruction,”105 as the Jesuits repeatedly insisted. The main point of this story is that the girls’ shame suggested that they had already taken the first step on their journey toward civilization because they now looked to the French as their models. Imitation would help them advance on the evolutionary continuum: the concept of shame was an advance over what the French saw as promiscuity. The second task of culture and imitation was transformation. The Amerindians had to be able to cross the boundary into the civilized French Catholic world. While this transformation meant a religious conversion, it also had to be accompanied by a similar cultural conversion: a “frenchification.”106 However, “frenchification” was more problematic than its religious counterpart since it was not clear what Frenchness meant. Christianity was already more clearly defined since it had been codified and embodied in a concrete set of practices, rituals, ceremonies, prayers, gestures, images, songs, beliefs, and so

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forth. The abstractness of Frenchness also needed to be defined in equivalent, concrete terms that responded to France’s assimilationist needs. The relateurs endowed French, Catholic culture with magical properties capable of transforming those who imitated it. Father Le Jeune told the story of Attikamegou, a Huron infant living near Trois Rivières in 1636. He was on his deathbed when his parents gave him to the Jesuits to see if they could cure him. No sooner had Le Jeune performed the standard practice of pronouncing some holy words than the infant recovered. Impressed by the power of the Catholic faith, Attikamegou’s parents gave him to the priest: “Do to him . . . all thou doest to the French children.”107 The Jesuits renamed the baby François Olivier and gave him to a new set of adoptive French parents, Sieur Olivier and Madame Hebout, who made him imitate the ways of a French infant: “They had swaddled this little Christian in the French fashion; its [birth] mother, holding it, said to her husband: ‘I do not know what ails our little François Olivier; when he is dressed in the French way he laughs all the time, when he is dressed in our way he cries and grieves; when I hold him he is quite sad and mournful, and when a French woman holds him he acts as if he wants to jump all the time.’ She wished by these words to show her satisfaction at seeing her son become French, as it were.”108 Following French customs, the birth parents had Attikamegou/François Olivier “dressed in the French way.” His imitation caused a profound inner change in his emotions. Even though Attikamegou/François Olivier had not yet developed his rational faculties, he felt the difference instinctively, becoming happy when his adoptive French mother held him in the French fashion. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, French culture caused a parting of peoples, separating the civilized, French, Catholic side from the savage side. The divide was so strong that even a baby felt the difference. His changed feelings and behavior indicated his transformation was so complete that his birth mother no longer claimed him as her own child. She was delighted to see her son “become French.” The third task of French culture was defensive: to safeguard the community’s identity and purity. The relations’ stories about the transformation of outsiders were also stories about boundaries. In imitating French, Catholic culture, the Amerindians experienced the magical effects of French culture which created boundaries out of the felt differences between the two worlds. The Native Americans were compelled towards the feelings that their contact with French culture stimulated in them and were allegedly repelled by the feelings they had when surrounded by their own kind. These feelings functioned as boundaries drawn in their hearts. For example, Father Le Jeune described

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how the imitation of French customs affected Amerindian girls: “When these little girls are dressed in the French fashion, they care no more for the Sauvages than if they did not belong to their Nation.”109 Similarly, when Amerindian children played French games with France’s children, they no longer even “look at the Sauvages except to flee from them or mock them.”110 Imitating France’s Catholic culture and faith caused the colonized to naturally follow France’s assimilationist goal to “wean [the Amerindians] from their native customs.”111 Emphasizing the Amerindians’ seemingly voluntary and natural identification with the French, one Amerindian chief supposedly said to another: “Let us abandon our old ways to those which are taught us, and which are better than ours.”112 After a certain Amerindian named Negabamat was baptized and renamed Estienne, he emerged from the baptismal holy bath and said: “It seems to me that I am different from what I was—that I have another life in me.”113 Completely changed, this Native American could no longer bear any connection with his old life. In a violent act of repudiation, he proclaimed: “[Let us] renounce all our follies, and trample under foot all our old customs.”114 The French goal to “change . . . their Pagan and Barbarous life to one that is civilized and Christian” was working, according to the French missionaries’ reports.115 In short, the transformative power of French, Catholic culture caused the Native Americans to realign themselves with the French as an “us” against their own customs and community. These boundaries were more powerful than any lines drawn on a map because they were supposedly engraved in their hearts, affecting them at the deepest levels. The Amerindians supposedly internalized French values, upholding their colonizers as models even when it did not seem necessary, just as the French cultured elite had internalized the Ancients’ values. The Amerindians maintained the newly constructed “us-them” boundaries, even in the wilderness, where the laws of civilization held less sway and the Amerindians outnumbered the French. And yet they identified with the French and against their fellow tribal members. We read in the Jesuit Relations of Nanaskoumat, a baptized Huron renamed François Xavier, who went on a hunting trip for elk with some French colonists and Jesuits just before Lent. He had prepared for the trip by bringing along some meat and smoked eel. The Jesuits had said nothing to him about the Christian practice of abstaining from meat during Lent because they were lenient toward new converts. Once they were in the woods, Nanaskoumat noticed that his French companions were not eating meat, even though they were weak with hunger. Wanting to be like the French, he too refrained from eating meat. Father Le Jeune marveled at Nanaskoumat’s

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restraint, especially as he was accompanied by his nonbaptized family members, who were living it up, feasting on the tongues and upper lips of moose, Amerindian delicacies hard to turn down. Nanaskoumat saw them “eating the choicest morsels before his eyes”116 and smelled the delicious aroma. Le Jeune prodded him, asking whether he wasn’t tempted just to taste a little bit of the fine meat before him. Nanaskoumat replied that at the beginning of Lent he put his heart under the table, which is why his eyes did not even see the meat. He then added, “Should we not suffer a little as well as the other Christians? We wish to please God, as well as you people.”117 Even in the wilderness, the French, Catholic model of behavior held sway. Le Jeune framed the story as a tug of war between the worlds of the Amerindians and the French, with Nanaskoumat in the middle but ultimately favoring the French, Catholic side. Le Jeune commented: “Who would ever have thought that . . . such abstinence would be practiced by a Savage who formerly gorged himself with human flesh!”118 Even under adverse circumstances, and even though the divide between the “sauvage” and the civilized remained strong, the Amerindians chose to be true to French, Catholic ideals, highlighting the fact that their imitation was voluntary and exerted a true civilizing force over them. The relateurs emphasized imitation as a voluntary subjection for three basic reasons. First, it would persuade the French church and state that colonization would be easy if the Amerindians were good, docile, and pliable colonial subjects. This line of argumentation seemed all the more plausible because it resonated with the analogous story about the French elite’s imitation of the Ancients. Just as the French elite acknowledged their inadequacies and looked to the Ancients as their models, the Amerindians recognized their inferiority and looked to the French as a guide. Second, the Amerindians’ imitation meant they would not seek to create a hybridized culture. Because they acknowledged their deficiencies, the sauvages did not see themselves as equals, seeking a negotiated identity; rather they identified against their own ancestral heritage, policing and adhering voluntarily to how the French imagined the boundaries of their worlds. Father Le Jeune affirmed the power of this boundary when he commented on what happened after a young girl, having been brought up “in the French way” with French settlers, went back to visit her birth father. When she “goes back to the Cabins of the sauvages, her father, very happy to see his daughter well clothed and in very good condition, does not allow her to remain there long, sending her back to the house where she belongs” (my emphasis).119 Her birth father, feeling the transformative effect

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of French culture on her soul as positive, understood that she no longer belonged on the sauvage side of this divide. She was no longer his. He yielded to the thrust of civilization sweeping upward and sent his daughter back to the French, as if that were her true place. In this context, a blended Franco-Amerindian culture seemed inconceivable to the French, although such a métissage was precisely what did happen. The third reason for emphasizing the Amerindians’ voluntary subjection was that it suggested the New World natives gave their consent to colonization/ evangelization. Their implied consent was designed to respond to one of the key obstacles that France’s colonial project posed. When news of the New World reached Europe, the pope did not give France an official sanction to evangelize, colonize, or civilize the New World inhabitants. He gave that right exclusively to Spain and Portugal. France thus had to build its claim to dominion on alternative grounds. To circumvent the pope, the French asserted that because the Amerindians were asking for their help, requesting models to imitate, the French had the duty and the right to help their “brothers.” As Patricia Seed has argued, “no other Europeans so consistently sought the political permission of the natives in order to justify their own political authority.”120 The Amerindians’ supposed consent conferred legitimacy on the French colonial enterprise.

Thus far, this chapter has sought to highlight the pivotal role of culture and imitation in responding to the boundary problems of the French model of colonization. Imitation, as an element of culture, functioned as “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge,” to repeat Bhabha’s phrase, by creating the illusion of a voluntary subjection that is presented as a love story. While all forms of imitation were important, art played an even more elusive and deceptive role in the colonizing/civilizing process by allowing for a high level of social and political surveillance and control. For Le Jeune, art constituted the major divide determining what he saw as the three stages of human development. In his relation of 1634-35, he wrote: “It was the opinion of Aristotle that the world had made three steps, as it were, to arrive at the perfection which it possessed in his time. At first men were contented with life, seeking purely and simply only those things which were necessary and useful for its preservation. In the second stage, they united the agreeable with the necessary, and politeness with necessity. First they found food, and then the seasoning. In the beginning, they covered themselves against the severity of the weather, and afterward grace and beauty were added to their garments.

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In the third stage, men of intellect, seeing that the world was enjoying things that were necessary and pleasant in life, gave themselves up to the contemplation of natural objects and to scientific research.”121 A life without art characterized the lowest stage in the hierarchy of human development. This was the stage in which he situated the Amerindians. Without art, these sauvages resembled animals and wore the same clothes, so to speak. They dressed like animals: their clothes were “made of the skin of Elk, Bears, and other animals.” Nature dictated not only what they wore but also how they wore it: “They only clothe themselves according to the exigencies of the weather, as soon as the air becomes warm or when they enter their Cabins, they throw off their garments and the men remain entirely naked, except a strip of cloth which conceals what cannot be seen without shame. As to the women, they take off their bonnets, sleeves and stockings, the rest of the body remaining covered.”122 The Amerindians had no art because their primary concern was to defend against the natural elements. For Le Jeune, their lack of concern about artistic fashions indicated their barbarism. “There are some [American Indians] who wear sleeves, stockings, and shoes, but in no other fashion than that which necessity has taught them.”123 They wore clothes merely for warmth and comfort, not style. “Their only thought is to live, they eat so as not to die; they cover themselves to keep off the cold, and not for the sake of appearance.”124 There were oblivious to how they appeared in the eyes of others. “Their stockings are made of Moose skin, from which their hair has been removed, nature and not art setting the fashion for them; they are considered well made if the feet and legs go into them, no ingenuity being used in making corners.”125 Like animals, the Amerindians were concerned only with survival. Their ideals were based on asocial, utilitarian practices. Art constituted a major step forward in the civilizing process because it lifted human beings out of their first state of nature and into a second, more advanced stage, according to Le Jeune. Art encouraged them to live in the eyes of their neighbors, transforming barbarians into more sociable creatures. “In the early ages, houses were simply to be used, and afterward they were made to be seen.”126 Cultivating artistic appearances, designed to be looked at, helped constitute the community and its social laws. Artistic surfaces, visible to all, forged social bonds by providing a shared sense of what was worthy of attention. In order for an object or behavior to be deemed praiseworthy or foolish, the community members had to have a hierarchy of values that grounded any given judgment. To belong to the community was to know what those values

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and standards were and to abide by them. Artistic surfaces established boundaries, demarcating those who followed the proper art forms as insiders and those who did not as outsiders. When civilized people did things in order to be noticed, they did not isolate themselves in the particularized needs of mere convenience or comfort but turned toward a collective set of values, imitating the commonly accepted notions of the good. By contrast, barbarians developed no distinctions governing their sartorial behavior. Everything was acceptable. Le Jeune disdainfully described their lack of distinctions: “During the winter all kinds of garments are appropriate to them, and all are common to both women and men, there being no difference at all in their clothes; anything is good, provided it is warm.”127 Not only did men and women wear the same clothes, young girls wore the same clothes as old men. Le Jeune bemoaned their lack of tailors to adjust a man’s coat to a young girl’s size; the mass of material was simply gathered around the young girl’s body “like one fastens twigs.”128 No one cared how they looked, so long as they were warm. “Give them a hood, and a man will wear it as well as a woman; for there is no article of dress, however foolish, which they will not wear in all seriousness if it helps to keep them warm.”129 No sartorial codes kept them in check. “In Europe, if a boy should dress up like a girl, he would be a masquerader. In New France, a woman’s dress is not improper for a man. The Ursuline Mothers having given a dress to a young girl who was leaving their seminary, the man who married her wore it soon afterward, with as much grace as did his wife; and, if the French made fun of him, he only laughed, taking their raillery for approval”130 Le Jeune ridiculed this crossdressed husband for not even understanding that the French were ridiculing him. The husband should have felt shame. His laughter was mistaken, as he failed to adhere to an important aesthetic convention that totally escaped his notice. His obtuseness suggested that he and his fellow barbarians had few social boundaries to protect their community. Without any distinctions—aesthetic, social, or moral—the barbaric world had no inside or outside; all categories were acceptable. If all garments were appropriate and no social laws regulated daily behavior and social practices, then no one was stylish or foolish; they just simply were. There could be no real community until meaningful distinctions organized the collective. Without distinctions they were just a group of people who temporarily banded together like nomads and would disband as soon as convenience required. Leading a nomadic life, barbarians were guided by private asocial goals rooted in individual needs. So long as the Amerindians had no concern for art and

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the approval of others, they would remain uncivilized. If they failed to make distinctions that would constitute and designate the community’s boundaries, they would remain at the lowest rung on the continuum. For Le Jeune, imitation was the greatest sign of the Amerindians’ progress. After characterizing the three stages of human development, he portrayed the Amerindians’ cultural advances by describing how they were now wearing French shirts. While these shirts signaled that the Amerindians were on the cusp of being transformed, Le Jeune also poked fun at them, observing ironically that they “w[ore] them in a new fashion.”131 Unlike the French, who wore their shirts underneath their clothes, the Amerindians wore the French shirts on top to catch the grease spilling on them from their favorite foods, bear fat and moose tongue. Not concerned with how the shirts looked, they did not wash them, allowing multiple layers of grease to accumulate. The shirts became “in no time as greasy as dish-rags.”132 The Amerindians did not yet grasp the concept of style, which meant the French way of wearing a shirt. But they would come to understand it in time. While Le Jeune chuckled over their poor imitation, at least they were on the right track—they were wearing clothes. And the clothes were French. Clearly the Amerindians were already embarked on their journey toward civilization because they wanted to resemble the French, or so Le Jeune thought. Because imitation was so central to the Amerindians’ civilizing process, Le Jeune filtered many of his perceptions through the lens of a mimetic dynamic. Dismissing the greasy shirts as poor imitations of the French, he failed, however, to perceive that the Native Americans were, in fact, not imitating the French at all. They greased up the French shirts as a clever new invention, otherwise known as a raincoat. The greasy layers of food created a protective cover impermeable to rain. This was no accident. As Le Jeune observed: “This is just as they wish them to be, for the water, they say, runs over them and does not penetrate into their clothes.”133 But Le Jeune was impermeable to this alternative logic. Imitation, then, was the lynchpin of the civilizing process in France’s colonial discourse. Imitation helped those lower on the evolutionary continuum to raise themselves to a higher level. The Amerindians appeared to be the perfect colonial subjects because they were supposedly eager to imitate the French and become transformed into creatures capable of forming an “us” with their colonizers. This assimilationist narrative appeared plausible and vraisemblable because of its resonance with the French elite’s own imitation of the Ancients.

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Was the French Imitation of the Ancients a Voluntary Subjection? The parallels in the nation’s colonial and cultural discourses reflected back on the meaning of imitation in the cultural context of elite France’s mimetic relationship to the Ancients. In both discourses, those lower on the imagined continuum imitated those above them. Correspondingly, those in the lower group sought to sever the bonds with their former existence, distanced themselves from their first birth and were born again, as it were, into a second culture, deemed superior. In both discourses, imitation set the whole dynamic in motion. In both, imitation was framed as a love story, which camouflaged its underlying power dynamic of colonization. And in both cases, although the voluntary subjection was muted, it was not masked. These parallels in the mimetic dynamic, however, produced two contrary effects. On the one hand, they supported the French assimilationist strategy toward the Amerindians by making it seem natural, workable, and worthy of support. Just as the Ancients had civilized the Gauls/French, the French could civilize the Amerindians, with both using the same fundamental strategy. On the other hand, this analogous relationship contained a darker, more disturbing suggestion. The frame could be reversed, especially given France’s haunting colonial past. Were the French to the Ancients what the Amerindians were to the French? If the French used imitation as a deceptive tool to induce the Amerindians to put on their own chains, was the French elite’s imitation of the Ancients also a voluntary subjection? The Romans had in fact used their arts and letters as a covert tool of colonization, as discussed earlier. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, the Romans tricked the Gauls into imitating Rome’s supposedly superior civilization as part of a civilizing process, which was also a covert subjugating process. I am not arguing that the moderns in France’s Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns necessarily grasped this parallel consciously. But I am suggesting that many intuited it, thus illuminating why the elite sensed such a strong danger in imitation, even if they could not always articulate its precise nature. The concept of a voluntary subjection was a part of the nation’s cultural and historical heritage. History is full of examples. Etienne de La Boétie, in a different context, explained its psychological dynamics. In La Servitude volontaire (1548), he sought to explain how a given people might unknowingly love their chains. He compared a subjugated people to a well-trained horse. Strapped into a harness, the horse would initially buck and struggle violently to break loose from the yoke. But over time, it would accept its master’s will

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as its own. Eventually, the master could remove the physical restraint and the horse would behave as if the harness were still in place. Out of habit, the horse would engage in a voluntary servitude, forgetting its former freedom. Some moderns in the Quarrel feared that France was like a well-trained horse that had forgotten to reclaim its former freedom even though its former master was dead. Like this horse, the French elite had learned to love their chains, deceiving themselves into believing those chains led to a civilizing process. Hence they glorified those chains and decorated them with flowers to camouflage the fact that they led to a voluntary subjection. In imitating the Ancients, were the French elite not simply reenacting the old colonial dynamic and strapping on their own chains? It would seem that this underlying strain of the Quarrel would eventually lead to Rousseau’s later critique of the arts and letters in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts when he expressed the fear that “civilized peoples” have unwittingly become “happy slaves.”134 Picking up on La Boétie’s image of the horse, Rousseau wrote in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men: “An untamed steed bristles his mane, paws the earth with his hoof, and breaks away impetuously at the very approach of the bit, [whereas] a trained horse patiently endures the whip and spur.”135 Comparing humans to a horse, Rousseau continued: “Barbarous man does not bend his head for the yoke, [whereas] civilized man wears [the yoke] without a murmur.” The harness for humans was indeed made out of a deceptive substance—the seductive appeal of arts and letters. Humans placed themselves in chains but camouflaged them, as Rousseau famously wrote in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, by spreading “garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people.”136 Rousseau’s observation points to the undercurrent in the early modern era that I have tried to bring out in this chapter.

The Infinite Progression Toward Civilization The French elite had a model of human evolution based on the effects of art, similar to Le Jeune’s three stages. Many thought that imitating the Ancients’ art would help France escape their stage of barbarism. However, what they were imitating was the Greek and Roman definitions of civilization and of barbarism. The elite measured themselves against a foreign set of standards

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that were, by definition, impossible to meet. As long as the elite could not value their own differences but insisted on a fundamental sameness with a foreign set of Greek and Roman ideals, they could never equal their models and were doomed to remain perpetually almost but not quite civilized. Because the elite continually affirmed a sameness with the Ancients, despite many glaring differences, the nation’s elite imitated values that perpetually reminded them of those differences and hence of their imagined inferiority. Thus, the specter of the nation’s barbaric past continued to haunt the nation’s own journey to civilization, perpetuating the very colonial bind that they longed to transcend. The goal of civilization proved elusive, continually slipping from their grasp since the French were always “almost but not quite” civilized, to repeat Bhahba’s famous phrase. At what point could they claim that France had transcended the barbarism of its colonized past to achieve independence? These were key questions of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, and were what incited Boileau to scream at Perrault that France should be brought down a few notches on the evolutionary continuum for it was not yet equal to its models from classical antiquity. The question of where to situate the nation on its journey had been central to the Quarrel ever since du Bellay’s Défense. Many scholars have seen this text as a manifesto self-confidently proclaiming the greatness of the vernacular and of the nation’s world of letters. On the surface, Du Bellay appeared to affirm that barbarism was a thing of the past: “And even if the barbarity of our ancestors’ manners did rightly move them to call us barbarians, I do not see why we should be thought so now.”137 But what status did that “now” have? Du Bellay’s “now” appeared like a mirage throughout his text, continually slipping back into a “soon,” receding on a distant horizon. Greatness was a future promise, not a present accomplishment: “The time will perhaps come and I hope so . . . when our Language . . . which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and will grow to such height and girth, that it will equal the Greeks and Romans, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils and Ciceros.”138 Du Bellay’s claims for greatness sound tentative, since he used the future tense, qualified by a “perhaps,” and nudged on by a note of hope, “I hope so.” Du Bellay’s “now” recedes further into the future because he positioned greatness at the beginning of a continuum: “Our Language . . . which is just beginning to put down roots,” “our Language, which is just beginning to flower without bearing fruit, or rather, like a seedling and fresh shoot, has not yet flowered, much less yielded all the fruit it is capable of producing.”139 Moreover, the stature of that future greatness

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faded when Du Bellay claimed: it “still crawls on all fours.” 140 His aim was for the French language to “lift its head and get on its feet.”141 Not only was such progress modest, it would also come as a gift from someone else. “But the time will come . . . when some good person, no less bold than courageous than ingenious and learned, neither ambitious nor fearing the envy or hatred of any, will free us from that false opinion, giving our language the flower and fruit of great letters.”142 Placed in a passive position, French, so “poor and naked,” needs to receive “the ornaments and (so to speak) the feathers of others.”143 In short, France’s journey toward greatness danced on the edge of that “soon.” The vernacular was on the verge of losing its barbaric status, but it had not yet quite reached civilization. While the vernacular made large strides in the decades following Du Bellay, the Academy still saw civilization as a “soon,” looming on a future horizon. When Nicolas Faret, in Le projet de l’Académie pour servir de préface à ses statuts (1634), said that the French Academy’s goal was to “elevate [French] to the dignity of Greek and Latin,”144 he presumed its greatness still lay in some indeterminate future: “We want it to gain enough force to one day equal the magnificence of the Ancients. French is not incapable, as some would have it, of attaining the heights of such a difficult enterprise.”145 Faret was still struggling against the monstrous presence of France’s presumed barbarism. The problem was that some people, both inside and outside of France, still perceived the vernacular as barbaric: “The language spoken by the King, which communicates his orders and which must announce his glory, is still ranked by some among the barbaric languages.”146 The work of countering the charge of barbarism was still an ongoing, arduous effort: “This project . . . is the work neither of one man nor of one day.”147 As much as Faret imagined French’s greatness would arrive “soon,” he was still haunted by the fear of degeneration. Constant vigilance was necessary to “resist the general decay of the world.”148 Regardless of the progress the language had already made, it was still not sufficient to push it over the line and fully stabilize itself as civilized. Its unstable position meant it was at risk of being pulled back down into its darker past. Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, an Academy member who wrote the institution’s official history a few decades later in 1652, corroborated Faret’s formulation. French was still far from its goal; an official institution was necessary to “remove this language that we speak from the ranks of barbarian languages.”149 Aware that French was a language that “foreigners . . . have scorned until now,” Pellisson wanted the Academy to strengthen it so that “the books that will follow . . . will be worthy forever.”150

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While Dominique Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène formulated his defense of the vernacular as an escape from barbarism, he was not fully convinced this goal had yet been achieved in 1671. Recognizing that this process had been taking place over many centuries, he stated that it began in earnest with François I: “The great qualities of Francois I rendered the French language famous when it was still half-barbaric.”151 The first French kings tried to polish (polir) this barbaric language, but because they themselves also spoke such a monstrous language, they were trapped within it. “The language of that century was nothing but pure barbarism, as well as that of the following centuries.”152 Because the French themselves were barbarians, they had trouble cultivating their language: “Beyond the fact that the French were still very barbaric, they were so occupied by wars that they believed they did not have the time to cultivate the sciences: instead they thought more of making great deeds than of making beautiful discourses.”153 For centuries, the French grappled with the accusation that their language as well as their manners were barbaric: “This monster lasted a long time, since the barbarism of their language existed, along with that of morals, for many centuries.”154 Although Bouhours posited that the moment of the great divide came after Balzac and Vaugelas, he still presented the vernacular as wobbling on the edge of civilization. Five years later, in 1676, when defending the vernacular in his Défense de la langue française, pour l’inscription de l’Arc de Triomphe dédiée au Roy (1676), François Charpentier argued that French had made so much progress that it was now more perfect than ever, and thus worthy of immortalizing the king.155 And yet he was still doing battle with the specter of French’s supposed defective birth: “These barbaric expressions have been softened,” he wrote, and French has “repaired the vices of its birth.”156 No longer “in its first era, crude, rude and disordered,” French had transcended its lowly origin: “It serves no purpose to dwell on its childhood mumblings, and to say that French had only been known by the name of a ‘rustic Latin language’ by those who witnessed its birth.”157 And yet, Charpentier still assumed that French was inferior to Latin. “This language that has been judged so beautiful by other nations has never reached such a high degree of perfection as it has today, and if one must still admit that French is inferior to the Roman tongue, I do not see that [such a point of perfection] is so far-fetched that one could not imagine it.”158 Charpentier’s desired goal existed in the imagination more than in reality. As late as 1688, when the Collège des Quatre Nations was built, French had no place in the curriculum, as I indicated at the beginning of the chapter. This striking absence suggests that the vernacular was still devalued as barbaric

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and the nation had not yet attained the peak of civilization that its official rhetoric had boasted of. To be sure, not all lettrés assumed that French was still inferior to its models. Several seventeenth-century writers ridiculed the view that the French language was insufficient. In 1650, Charles de St. Evremond circulated an anonymous mock play, La comédie des académistes  pour la réformation de la langue Française, which reviled the Academy for its belief that French was barbaric. This play charged that the Academy’s pursuit of a purified dictionary not only was a waste of time but also reified the very perceptions its members had hoped to dissipate. St. Evremond’s play lambasted the Academy for wasting two years focused on six words when in fact the language was already rich.159 Similarly, Gilles Ménage anonymously wrote in his Requête présentée par les dictionnaires: Leave your words today Put your grammar away Make nothing new, do not create And our language remains great.160 Ménage felt no need to defend the French language since to defend it presupposed its weakness. But when many of the elite insisted that imitation was the best escape route, they found that the imagined divide between barbarism from civilization was a marker that continually crept forward. No matter how much progress the French language and its civilization had made, it was never enough. The journey to civilization took on the quality of Zeno’s paradox. The distance between the imagined destination and the present was continually divided in half so that the end point would never be reached. France’s world of letters was always “almost but not quite” equal to the Ancients. So long as the French elite persisted in imitating the Romans to help them advance on the continuum of civilization, their progression would not take them where they were heading, since their models themselves were perennially between barbarism and civilization. Imitation did not provide an escape route from barbarism; it did not lead in a linear progression toward civilization. No matter how much progress the French and their language had made, it seemed that they were forever poised on the cusp, just barely over the edge, approaching their goal of civilization but never quite arriving there. In emulating the Romans, they were imitating

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the same trap that the Romans fell prey to in relation to the Greeks, always measuring themselves according to a foreign ideal and always falling just short of the mark. Like their Roman models, the French elite were caught in between civilization and barbarism, always progressing toward their ideal, but never quite attaining it. Imitation also entailed a covert regression because it risked making the French fall into a self-imposed process of subjugation, unwittingly repeating the original colonial dynamic the Romans had imposed on the Gauls. This dynamic prevented the elite from truly taking pride in their own independent world of letters and in themselves, even though their actual accomplishments were enormous. Imitation led back into a vicious circle because the ideals and beliefs that the elite were emulating came from thought structures that had no place for the French as true equals, but relegated them to the position of barbarian other.

chapter 7

Imitation and the “Classical” Path

This chapter examines a second escape route, which ultimately led to the ideal that scholars have labeled “classical.” This term, however, is misleading for three reasons.1 First, it implies that this cultural ideal emerged only in relation to the Ancient World. Second, it assumes only one side of that relationship— kinship and similarity. Third, it implies that the nature of France’s relationship to the Ancient World was simply cultural, and not colonial. This chapter shows the limits of these assumptions by demonstrating how the classical ideal emerged out of the nation’s struggle to grapple with its colonial and cultural dilemmas in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World. I will argue that the classical art of imitation evolved as a defensive structure to guard against the threats on both ends of the spectrum. To colonize the New World, many of the relations portrayed the sauvages as an “us.” However, this similarity risked endangering the French nation, constituting a danger from below. To decolonize from the Ancient World, many of the cultured elite saw the Ancients as an imperial “them,” thus constituting a danger from above. The elite thus sought to carve out a dignified and independent cultural identity for the nation in between both poles. I of course do not wish to reduce the classical simply to this dynamic, but rather to argue that it forms part of a larger network of contributing factors. In presenting this second escape route, I do not mean to imply that its proponents were composed of an entirely separate group from those who put forward the first route. Frequently, the same lettrés proposed two conflicting escape routes because they harbored conflicting stances toward the Ancients and imitation. I see these vacillations not as contradictions but as a source of richness and a way into the deepest dilemma these writers faced: how to disentangle their self-understanding from the derogatory narratives that were 173

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embedded in the models they were imitating. How to see themselves through their own eyes? The haunting memory of the nation’s barbaric past was hard to erase for two reasons. First, the charge of barbarism came from two different interlocking stories: (1) the seventeenth century drama of colonizing the New World barbarian; and (2) the archaic drama about the nation’s own colonized past. In itself, neither story would have probably made a great impact on the French consciousness. But each story gained traction by resonating with the other and creating an interlocking dynamic, thus stimulating an anxiety about the barbarian deep within the French psyche. Their combined effect shaped the evolution of France’s own culture, pushing it toward a classical ideal. The second reason the nation’s barbaric past had a strong grip on the French consciousness was because the elite were largely trapped in a mental frame that privileged the past over the present and the future. The only way the moderns could truly win out over the ancients and escape the legacy of their past would be to reverse the slant of history and rescue nature from the notion of degeneration by envisaging a concept of progress. The French classical ideal gestured in this direction, as this chapter will reveal, but would not ultimately make the necessary, decisive break with the past. The most fundamental humanist idea of the superiority of the Ancients still reigned, even though many facets of humanism were crumbling. Given this perspective, a progressive view of history was inconceivable. But paradoxically, the classical ideal, which looked backward, provided a foundational mode of thought upon which other thinkers would build, and could look forward. The following chapter will show how the third and successful escape route from barbarism was constructed on top of the “classical” path, but reversed it and ushered in modernity.

The Amerindians as an “Us”: France’s Colonial Discourse and the Erosion of the Civilization/Barbarism Boundaries The nation’s relationship with the New World sauvages was as confused as that with the Ancients. Were the Amerindians an “us” or a “them”? The nation’s colonial discourse mainly framed them as an “us,” whereas its cultural discourse framed the Amerindians as a “them.” This confusion will illuminate the nature of imitation and its function. The colonial discourse of the relations de voyage painted the Amerindians

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in two conflicting ways. At times, the New World inhabitants were considered alien creatures, as vicious as they were strange. But at other times, they appeared more as children who were good and educable. This latter portrait dominated when the relateurs sought to promote the nation’s assimilation policy of transforming the Amerindian “them” into a French, Catholic “us.” To promote colonization, the relations insisted on the fundamental similarity between the French and the Amerindians. There were three basic forms. First, there was a basic ontological similarity between them, denying any natural differences. Second, they followed a similar evolutionary path. Third, they were linked through blood ties. Regarding their ontological similarity, the relations did not view the Amerindians as possessing a different essence; otherwise it would be hard to imagine how they could imitate the French sufficiently to become transformed and be assimilated into the civilized, Catholic world of France. Father Paul Le Jeune wrote: “As to the mind of the Sauvage, it is of good quality. I believe that their souls are all made from the same stock, and that they do not materially differ. Hence these barbarians having well formed bodies, and organs well regulated and well arranged, their minds ought to work with ease.”2 A fundamental sameness lay beneath the veneer of a seeming difference. Deep down, their souls were “made from the same stock” as those of the French. Thus these texts did not fix the Native Americans in the “sauvage” category. To be sure, the relations portrayed the Amerindians’ differences from the French. However, the texts attributed them to external factors that could be changed. One of the most obvious differences was their skin color. Yet the relateurs ascribed this difference to cultural factors such as the oils the Amerindians put on their skin. Moreover, they didn’t wear many clothes, exposing their skin to the sun and causing it to turn a different color. Le Jeune wrote: “Their natural color is like that of those French beggars who are half-roasted in the Sun, and I have no doubt that the Sauvages would be very white if they were well covered.”3 Similarly, Father Claude d’Abbeville wrote: “The truth is that they all have this brownish color that we call olive, which they seem to like: but I think that this color does not stem from the heat of their climate but from the oils and paints they ordinarily put on their whole body. Indeed, when they are born (as I have seen several) they are as white as the little infants of France. But they have a custom where one or two days after they are born, their whole body is rubbed with oil of Roucou, which is a red paint, which, after various days of application make them dark without having being exposed to the sun.”4 Beneath the surface, the Amerindians

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were fundamentally white, rendering them the same as the French. For these French observers, the Amerindians’ dark skin resulted from cultural practices that could be “corrected,” making their differences seem like carnival masks that could be easily removed. Because their cultural practices were not rooted in their essence, Le Jeune imagined the Amerindians as highly malleable, somewhat like a ball of wax that could be easily reshaped, with the French as the master molders. Emphasizing a second form of similarity, the relations placed the French and the Amerindians on the same cultural continuum of an evolutionary development leading from barbarism to civilization. The relateurs explained away the Amerindians’ differences by attributing them to the ignorance that all nations experienced in their earliest stages. One relateur, Marc Lescarbot, likened the Amerindians to the Gauls: “As life begins in ignorance, the world in its youth was rude, rustic and uncivilized.”5 The Amerindians had many undesirable and uncivilized practices just simply because they were ignorant. They led a nomadic life, as did all nations in their most primitive stage. In this regard, the Amerindians were no different from the Gauls, as Le Jeune remarked: “I think it is Cicero who says that all nations were once vagabond.”6 As a primitive people, the Amerindians adopted practices that resembled those of the Gauls. After describing how the Amerindians constructed beds out of animal skins spread on the ground to serve as a mattress, Le Jeune commented: “And in this we have nothing to jest about, for our old Gallic ancestors did the same thing, and even dined from the skins of dogs and wolves, if Diodorus and Strabo tell the truth.”7 Moreover, the civilized nations elsewhere in Europe were once in a similar state: “But let no one be astonished at these acts of barbarism. Before the faith was received in Germany, Spain or England, those nations were not more civilized. Mind is not lacking among the Sauvages of Canada, just education and instruction.”8 While the Germans, Spanish, and British were not yet perfectly civilized, as supposedly were the French, they were nevertheless on the civilization track, in line behind the French on the same evolutionary continuum. By analogy, the Amerindians were following behind them on the same upward path toward civilization. The relateurs were thus arguing for an evolutionary similarity, placed on the same track. Blood ties constituted the third similarity between the French and Amerindians, bringing them even closer together. Within a national context, blood of course constituted the primary marker separating members of different classes, although that boundary was being significantly weakened by the rise of

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a new merchant class. However, for political reasons, the nation’s colonial discourse needed to use the force of blood and other forms of supposed kinship to combat its Spanish and Portuguese competitors.9 As the previous chapter discussed, after Columbus had returned to Europe with the news of the New World, Pope Alexander VI forbade France to colonize, evangelize in, or trade with that part of the world. He gave those privileges to Spain and Portugal alone. The pope, a native of Valencia and a friend of the Castilian king, decreed that if any nation other than Spain and Portugal were to approach these lands, it would be acting “under penalty of excommunication,” according to the papal grant of 1493.10 France’s kings, from François I through Louis XIV, appealed to the pope to rescind that bull, but they were unsuccessful.11 Ultimately, the French church and state did not adhere to the papal interdiction, and became active in the New World. Nevertheless, they felt the need to legitimate their claim to colonize/evangelize/civilize the New World barbarians by constructing an alternative logic to circumvent the pope. I examined one strand of that alternative logic in the previous chapter, which argued that because the Amerindians were naturally imitating the French, they consented to have the French enter their land. This supposed popular consent legitimated the French colonizing endeavor, even if the pope did not think so.12 An additional strand of that alternative logic posited a familial bond between the French and the Amerindians. Supposing a common origin with the Amerindians, the French claimed that they were responsible for their kin. The founding father in this family was Noah, from whom both the French and the Amerindians were descended. Ever since the early sixteenth century in France, many intellectuals had begun the story of humankind with Noah and his three sons, rather than with Adam and Eve. The virtue of the Noah story was that it helped justify France’s expansionist goals. This story provided a common origin for many different peoples scattered over remote parts of the globe. Because Noah was a world navigator and had three sons, he became a key figure to explain how one family could expand to cover the entire earth yet remain united in a single unit. His sons’ birth order permitted a hierarchical structuring of the family parts. In one common version of the myth, Noah split up the world into three segments after the flood and gave one segment to each son.13 He gave Europe to his eldest son, Japheth. Asia went to Sem and Africa to Cham. Since the eldest son dominated, Europe had authority over Asia and Africa.14 In the sixteenth century, Guillaume Postel, a protégé of François I and a Jesuit priest who was ultimately excommunicated, argued that France, as a European nation and a descendant of Japheth, could evangelize the portion of

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the world for which Japheth was responsible; that portion included the New World. Tracing the Amerindians’ roots back to Noah, Postel argued that “the origin of the Amerindians . . . makes them blood-relatives”15 of the French. Such a kinship made France’s claims for evangelization and colonization equal to those of Spain and Portugal. Marc Lescarbot’s History of New France (1609) pushed the supposed kinship between the French and the Amerindians even closer.16 As a Paris lawyer who traveled to the New World in the service of the Catholic Reformation, Lescarbot penned several volumes of this history. They were so popular that they enjoyed several editions in the next nine years and were soon translated into English at Richard Hakluyt’s request. In this text, Lescarbot argued that since France’s familial bonds with the Amerindians were tighter than those of the Spanish or the Portuguese, France had a greater right to civilize/colonize them than did its European rivals. Lescarbot saw Noah as a Gaul. Noah was “nicknamed the Gaul because he was spared from the flood, and he also spared the human race, and repopulated the earth.”17 Noah’s son then peopled the New World. This meant that the French, the Gauls’ descendants, were longlost kin to the Amerindians. Arguing that Noah was the ancestral source of the American Indians, Lescarbot speculated that these primitive people had “an obscure knowledge of the flood,”18 the same flood from which Noah had been saved. Lescarbot then asked “what prevents us from believing that Noah, having lived 350 years after the Flood, has taken the care and the trouble to people, or rather to repopulate that country [the New World]?”19 Anticipating the objection that at the time of the flood the New World had not yet been discovered, he insisted that Noah knew about it; after all, he had helped populate it. But because no books were written to report it, its existence was lost to European memory. This lineage justified colonization by making the French and Native Americans lost-lost kin. This logic circumvented the lack of papal sanction, or so Lescarbot argued. Admiral François de Razilly also insisted on familial ties with the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil. He had journeyed to Maragnan, where he had hoped to establish a French colony in 1613. His account of his trip in the Mercure François highlighted the family ties between the French and Amerindians. He put the following words in the mouth of the Tupinamba chief: “We believe that there has been a deluge that made all the mortal creatures on earth perish because of their evils: God kept only a father and a mother from whom all humans have sprung forth. We [the Tupis and the French] were both only one people then” (my emphasis).20 Although the Tupis subsequently fell from their

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union with the French into misery, the two peoples were nevertheless “only one people” at their origin. Despite their fall, the Tupis now looked to their long-lost brothers as Christlike saviors to help them regain that original unity. We recall from the previous chapter that the Tupi chief reputedly told Razilly: “We hope that our children will learn God’s law, your arts and sciences, and this hope makes us believe that in the future we will only be one people and that others will take us for French” (my emphasis).21 In sum, the French and the Amerindians shared a common genealogy, a similar evolutionary path, and the same stock. These similarities supported France’s colonial ideology. They gave France the right and the duty to help its long-lost kin. Their shared heritage also explained why the Amerindians were good candidates for assimilation. The Amerindians were capable of imitating the French Catholics so fully that they would become French Catholics themselves. They could rid themselves of the differences that separated them from the French, and thus no natural obstacles to assimilation barred their way. The nation’s assimilationist ideology was predicated on a connection between the French and the Amerindians that reduced the divisive force of “usthem” boundaries. Those lowest on the continuum could progress upward and become part of a French, Catholic civilization. This logic, however, contained a dangerous underside, which Lescarbot brought out even though he intended to support assimilation. Seeking to account for the Native Americans’ origins, he contended that they could have descended from members of the French nobility who had been shipwrecked near New France and then cast adrift. He based this speculation on what he cited as a true story. In 1598, the Marquis de la Roche of Brittany organized a crew to colonize part of the New World with the king’s permission. He traveled to an area near Nova Scotia to decide where to erect a settlement. On his return voyage to France, he was overtaken by a contrary wind, which destroyed his vessel. He and his crew were forced to camp on an island for five years. They had to live like sauvages—they dressed in animal skins and lived on fish and the milk of some cows they had brought with them. Finally they were rescued. Wearing their walrus skins, they returned to France and presented themselves to Henri IV and his court looking like sauvages. Using this story about the Marquis de la Roche’s regression into savagery as his foundation, Lescarbot proposed the following theory of origins for the Amerindians. They could have been French people who had been cast adrift and forced to live like animals. The ship’s passengers, “finding themselves naked, [were] compelled to live by hunting and fishing, and to clothe

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themselves in the skins of the animals which they had killed. Thus they would have multiplied and replenished the earth to a certain extent . . . so that although formerly they had some knowledge of God, little by little it disappeared, for lack of teachers.”22 Like the Jesuits, Lescarbot contended that the Native Americans were not fundamentally different from the French—indeed, their ancestors could have been French. Speculating on their origins, he wrote: “This is an example of how Sauvage peoples may have arisen. And had these men been permanently left there with a number of women, they or their children would have become like the people of New France, and little by little would have lost the knowledge of God.” Lescarbot intended these similarities to support France’s colonizing/civilizing ideal, emphasizing that the Amerindians were very malleable and “even as far as Florida inclusively, are very easy to be brought to the Christian religion.”23 Lescarbot did not seem to find the seemingly flimsy sauvage/civilized barrier troubling, because his image of these creatures in the state of nature was very positive. He saw them as innocent, good, and worthy of forming a New France. In fact, he attributed to them a “nobility” that provided the foundation for the myth of the Noble Savage.24 Moreover, he often seemed confident in the upward trajectory of the human, seeing it as a natural inclination. However, in other instances, his portrait was considerably darker and more frightening. A potentially troubling portrait of the French themselves thus emerged from Lescarbot’s portrait of the New World sauvages. Because only a thin veneer of civilization separated them from the Amerindians, the French could regress back into a state of savagery, especially given their contact with sauvages. Like the Marquis de la Roche and his crew, a shipwrecked humanity could be pulled downward on the continuum back into savagery. No natural boundaries prevented the French from taking such a wrong turn, as I discussed in Chapter 4. The relations described many incidents of a reverse influence in which the French were becoming like the sauvages, rather than the reverse.

Hobbes and the “Sauvage” Within The dangers of the fluid “us-them” boundaries reported in the relations resonated with an important current of European thought: Thomas Hobbes’s reflections on the state of nature. Hobbes theorized that no matter how secure the mantle of civilization might appear, it could crack. Regression was a

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fundamental and constant possibility for humans because the boundaries between barbarism and civilization were inherently tenuous. Hobbes suggested a version of what Lescarbot had proposed several decades earlier. The most civilized of human beings could slip back down the evolutionary continuum to their former beastlike state of nature. Because Hobbes imagined this state in its most fearsome form, this slippage constituted a much more frightening scene for him than it had for Lescarbot. Hobbes thus brought the sauvage much closer to home than Lescarbot had. The English philosopher suggested that this creature dwelled not simply on the far side of the Atlantic but within the human race itself, potentially infiltrating civilization everywhere. My turning to an English philosopher to further an argument about French thought might seem strange, but I do so for two reasons. First, Hobbes lived in Paris for many years, beginning in 1644 and including 1649–51, when he wrote the Leviathan.25 He frequented the learned circles of Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Guy Patin. He was a notorious figure whose ideas were well known to France’s major intellectuals, such as Descartes and the members of Port-Royal who cited and responded to his ideas. When he published the Leviathan in 1651, it provoked a storm of anger, with more than fifty volumes and countless sermons written soon afterward to attack his ideas. His notoriety was so great that no educated European could have claimed to be unaware or unacquainted with both his name and his basic philosophic notions, or so his contemporary, Bishop Tenison, contended.26 What most infuriated his critics was that he portrayed humans as “more barbarous and beastly than Beasts themselves,” in the words of an outraged Bishop Bramhall, who accused him of having “vilified” humankind.27 A mass of critics joined a deafening chorus against Hobbes’s “bestialization” of the human. This intense reaction placed Hobbes in the spotlight of European controversy and at the center of the debate about the natural, or sauvage, human state. His notoriety points to the strong emotional anxiety engendered by a fear of regression into the state of nature. My second reason for turning to Hobbes is because he was an avid reader of the relations. His model for man in the state of nature grew partly out these texts, as the political theorist Richard Ashcraft has shown.28 Traditionally, political theorists have situated Hobbes’s views on the state of nature in a long line of philosophic reflections that imagined what life would be like prior to the formation of civil society, like those of Aristotle, Plato, and Lucretius. For most scholars, Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature was an abstract, hypothetical construct emerging from an ahistorical philosophic tradition.

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However, Ashcraft has demonstrated that Hobbes’s model for the state of nature also came from a historical tradition grounded in the relations about the New World.29 In articulating his notion of the state of nature, Hobbes made explicit what was implicit in the most negative strands of the relations. He focused on the vicious, bestial side of the sauvage, bringing out this underlying strain in a more systematic and bold manner. In so doing, he articulated more clearly what was at stake in the specter of a regressive slide back toward barbarism. For Hobbes, the New World provided a living example of the most primitive state of nature. Barbarism was not just an abstract, theoretical speculation; it referred to a contemporary, concrete reality in the Americas. Describing his model for the state of nature, Hobbes wrote in the Leviathan, “There are many places where [people] live so now. For the savage people in many places of America . . . live at this day in that brutish manner, as I have said before.”30 In De Cive (1642), after describing “the natural state of men, before they entered into society . . . [as] a war of all men against all men,” he noted: “They of America are examples hereof, even in this present age.” Focusing specifically on the Native Americans, he described their life as “fierce, short-lived, poor, nasty, and deprived of all that pleasure, and beauty of life, which peace and society are wont to bring with them.”31 Similarly, in De Corpore Politico (1650), he wrote that we know about the natural “estate of hostility and war” from “the experience of savage nations that live at this day . . . where we find the people few and short-lived, and without the ornaments and comforts of life.”32 In short, the real-world existence of the Native Americans made the concept of a Hobbesian state of nature seem more real, making the possibility of backsliding loom larger in the French consciousness. Not only did Hobbes borrow heavily from the relations, he extracted the Amerindians’ negative features and ignored their more positive ones, skewing the balance to highlight their vicious side. The negative portrait had always been a feature of these descriptions; Columbus had provided the model for them by emphasizing what the sauvages lacked in relation to European civilization. Living according to nature, he wrote, they had no government and no faith.33 Vespucci subsequently observed that they were without churches, without faith, without markets, living according to nature. In combat, he reported, they knew neither art nor order. In fact, after they finished a battle, they were so beastlike that they ate their prisoners.34 The French travelers to the New World continued this pattern in describing the Amerindians.35 In his Singularitez de la France Antartique (1561), André Thevet portrayed a vicious

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“human eat human” world that might make Hobbes’s “dog eat dog” world fade in comparison.36 Thevet wrote that the Amerindians were “without faith, without law, without religion, without civility whatever, living like irrational beasts, as nature has produced them, eating roots, always naked, men as well as women.”37 Mathurin du Redouer described them as having no government, for “they lived together without King or Emperor; each man is his own lord.”38 They did not cultivate the land, as they were nomads, constantly on the move. They had no writing, no printing, no books, no arts or crafts.39 Louis Le Roy, writing in 1575, portrayed them as “people living yet as the first men, without letters, without laws, without Kings, without common wealth, without arts; . . . not civil by nature nor governed by discipline, . . . living without houses, towns, cities.”40 The most famous formulation came from Montaigne’s descriptions of the Tupinambas, who had “no manner of traffic; no knowledge of letters; no science of numbers; no name of magistrate or statesman; . . . no contracts; . . . no clothing; no agriculture; no metals.”41 In a similar vein, Lescarbot wrote that they lived “naked and nomadic, without police, law or religion.”42 Like the authors of the relations, Hobbes characterized the state of nature by its lack of those features that characterized European civilization. There was no central authority, no common set of laws, “no power able to overawe” all humans, who “have no government at all.” It was a state outside the commonwealth, where man “is an arrant wolf,” and “every man [is] against every man.”43 The fear of violent death undermined all efforts to invest in the future and produce anything of value. “If one plants, sows, builds, or possesses a convenient seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united to dispossess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labor, but also of his life, or liberty. And the invader again is in the like danger of another.” Unable to secure what they have achieved, human beings will not band together, nor will they separately seek to achieve much of lasting value, since they fear losing what they have gained, or indeed life itself. As Hobbes wrote, there is “no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving . . . no knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society.” In short, “the life of man” resembled that of beasts: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”44 Such a portrait was already threaded throughout many relations de voyage. Although this negative portrait of the state of nature had already existed

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in the relations long before Hobbes articulated it, the English philosopher differed from this French tradition by extracting the most negative representation of the sauvage from the relations and isolating it. He then generalized this part of the human, as if it represented the whole, and systematically developed the logic of its most basic premises. In so doing, he gave greater coherence and power to one important element underlying the relations—the fear of backsliding. Although Hobbes and the relations portrayed the state of nature in similar terms, he was subject to attack, whereas the relateurs were not.45 Their main difference is that the relateurs pointed to non-Europeans situated across the vast ocean, whereas Hobbes brought the sauvage back home, metaphorically speaking. This shadowy figure inhabited the hidden depths of all humans, he argued. Beneath the thin veneer of civilization lurked a “sauvage within.” All humans could sink back into this state if they failed to abide by the laws of civil society that kept their natural, destructive passions in check. Laws of civility and constant vigilance were necessary because the sauvage within us all lurked like a monster beneath the surface, ready to pounce at the slightest provocation. Thus, the sauvage was never totally other—it inhabited the very heart of the community in the subterranean structures of the social order and of the human. The “them” was an “us” in a less-evolved form. In sum, Hobbes’s reflections on the state of nature brought to the surface the deepest fears implied within France’s colonial discourse, but in a clearer and bolder form: the propensity to regress into the barbaric was a fundamental condition of the human. But the potential for backsliding was greater in France given its assimilationist stance toward the sauvage. Assimilation, more than any other colonizing strategy, stretched the nation’s boundaries to the furthest degree because it sought to include the other, transforming outsiders into insiders. Assimilation presented a boundary dilemma in its sharpest form, as I discussed in chapter 4. The nation’s elastic boundaries thus made the cultured elite more prone to the kind of anxiety that Boileau expressed when he had insulted Perrault and the moderns by comparing them to the Hurons and Tupinambas. The return of the sauvage was a danger from below that needed to be defended against. This danger was the quintessential threat that civilization had to guard against and gave rise to different kinds of protective shields. Cultural boundaries supported by their imitation of the Ancients became all the more important because no natural boundaries existed to separate the civilized from the barbaric. The imitative arts thus became a vital, protective armor to defend against the sauvage.

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The Role of Culture as a Defensive Shield Against Regression into Barbarism In eroding the boundaries between the barbaric and the civilized, the nation’s colonial discourse stimulated what I call a “crisis of similarity” with the sauvage, evoking the specter of backsliding into barbarism. While this fear emerged out of the nation’s colonial relation to the New World, it gained traction because it tapped into a deeper, more archaic drama about the nation’s colonial relation to the Ancient World. The fear of backsliding, coming from the combined force of both colonial dramas, shaped what is called the classical ideal. Imitation and France’s emerging culture served as a protective shield against the fear of regression into the stage of the primitive. Art and imitation were pivotal in propelling the human forward along the three stages of evolutionary development, as Le Jeune’s 1634–35 relation discussed. Art lifted humans out of their first state of nature into a second and more elevated form of social organization marked and controlled by culture. In 1636, a major cultural battle broke out in France about the nation’s own journey on that same path, conjuring up the fear of a backsliding. This battle was called the Quarrel of the Cid, as it was centered on Corneille’s play Le Cid performed in 1636. Dubbed a “quarrel,” it constituted a smaller controversy within the larger Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This smaller battle was in many respects a microcosm of the larger one in its seventeenthcentury phase, raising many of the same issues. Like the larger struggle, the Quarrel of the Cid seems silly and trivial, since its stated issues do not reflect the real concerns of the opposing parties. The stated issues were that Le Cid had insufficiently elevated verse and that it had failed to conform to the three dramatic unities stipulating that all plays should take place within twenty-four hours and in one place, and have a single plot. Le Cid offended the laws of les bienséances. Many critics excoriated Corneille on additional charges, such as plagiarism. And yet these minor issues blew up into major matters of state. The Quarrel began when Georges de Scudéry, one of Corneille’s rivals, became jealous of Le Cid’s popular success. He then brought Le Cid before the French Academy to ask this newly formed institute to pass judgment on it. Both the Academy and Cardinal Richelieu took this case very seriously. Appointing two different committees to review the play, the Academy scrutinized Le Cid, came up with excruciatingly detailed commentaries on almost every line, and ultimately rewrote it. Richelieu himself read the Academy’s reports carefully

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and provided guidelines for revisions.46 His investment in this Quarrel was so great that after handing his own report to the press, he then retracted it to make yet further revisions. The reports were finally published under the title Les sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid in 1637. Richelieu and the Academy’s surprising concern over the play suggest that much more was at stake than first meets the eye. Hélène Merlin-Kajman has astutely argued that what was really at stake was the French Academy’s power to determine public taste. The fact that the Quarrel of the Cid erupted in 1636, just a year after the French Academy was founded, was no accident. As a fledgling institution, the Academy used this popular play to affirm its own legitimacy. It wanted to dramatize the need for such an official body, and it used the play to engage in a power struggle. At issue was who gets to define the “public” and France’s dominant cultural values.47 Building on Merlin-Kajman’s argument, I contend that those values had to restrain the barbarian within and keep it at bay. To gain access to the Quarrel of the Cid’s real and unstated issue, it is necessary to recall the previous chapter’s discussion that raised the question of where elite France situated itself on the evolutionary scale that Father Le Jeune had articulated. If the French elite were in a stage between the Amerindians and the Ancients, where were they on that continuum? At the top, close to the Ancients? Or firmly planted in the middle? Or slipping down toward the sauvages? France’s position was unstable, since the specter of a regression into barbarism constantly loomed on the horizon of this debate. This question was hidden beneath the strange reception that greeted Le Cid. When first performed in 1636, the play was a wild success among the theater-going public, with an emphasis on wild. Large crowds were moved by great passion for the play. Paul Pellison-Fontanier, in his official history of the French Academy, wrote: “One never tired of seeing the play, one talked of nothing else in company, everyone knew some part of it by heart, one taught it to children, and, in some parts of France, it became a proverb: ‘That is beautiful like The Cid.”48 As Mondory, one of the great actors of the time, wrote to Guez de Balzac on 18 January 1637, “The crowd at our doors was so large and our place suddenly seemed so small that corners of the theater usually meant for the pages became seats for the nobility.”49 It was rare for a play to attract such enormous crowds. Popularity meant a potentially dangerous wildness, since crowds could be stirred up into an uncontrolled, emotional frenzy. The public’s wild reaction cut to the quick of the Quarrel, as Merlin-Kajman

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has shown. It raised the following questions: Should theatergoing audiences trust their own feelings? Did their reactions need to be mediated by an institution? The French Academy thought they did. Les sentiments de l’Académie Française sur Le Cid argued that the public’s first and natural feelings were not legitimate and should not determine the play’s worth. Its popular success meant that Le Cid was not a legitimate success, because the play was structured to seduce and deceive. The play was “so pleasing . . . that it seemed as if it had been meant to please,” wrote one of its detractors.50 According to the Academy, the public’s spontaneous reactions were not legitimate, since they emerged unreflectively from their most primitive, uneducated feelings. The Academy argued that its own members had to determine the proper taste for the public. Those who supported Corneille and the play’s success argued that audiences had a right to their personal, subjective judgments. But Corneille’s defenders lost the battle, since an official institute was established to legislate the public’s feelings. Scudéry accused the play of harboring a barbarian within. He attacked its verse, “as if the author of The Cid had introduced on stage the language of the Tupinambas or that of Lower-Brittany.”51 For Scudéry and the Academy, the language of the Tupinambas’ and of those in lower-Brittany, embodied a linguistic savagery that was potentially the gateway to savagery itself. Scudéry and the Academy used the term “people” (peuple) to refer to the theatergoing public. This was a derogatory term in the seventeenth century that referred to the lower instincts of the human, connoting the mob.52 “The people,” the Academy wrote, are those “who hardly have more of a soul than an animal.” Their judgments come from those “who see everything with a . . . barbaric eye.”53 Trusting “the voice of the people” was like trusting “the opinion of a Monster with no [judgment],” wrote Scudéry. If the “people” found Le Cid pleasing, it was because this spectacle was invented to please “wild animals.”54 Scudéry likened texts that pleased the audience to deceptive animals.55 Another critic of Le Cid, Jean Chapelain, summed it up when he wrote in his Lettre sur les vingt-quatre heures: “We alone, the last of the barbarians,”56 worried that France itself was precariously balanced on the edge between barbarism and civilization. The fear of the “people” was a fear of the lowest part of the human, as if in a state of nature. The Quarrel of the Cid was so explosive, treating imitation as if it were a matter of life or death, because in some sense it was. At stake was the nation’s very humanity. One could not be fully human if one slipped back into barbarism. In this context, we gain a fuller understanding of the “classical.” Thomas

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Pavel has aptly characterized the classical style as an art of distancing.57 Erica Harth has also described this distancing effect, observing that while art had to imitate nature, it had to prevent the copy from being confused with the object itself.58 To create that distance, the French cultural ideal was marked by increasing levels of refinement, elegance, and rationalized order. That ideal created distance by highlighting the artifice of its imitative dynamic. But why was distance so necessary? What needed to be distanced? Nature, understood as the first and most primitive state of the human, is what had to be defended against. Art should ideally represent a second nature reborn out of culture. Distanced from this first nature, artistic representations buffer the human against the primitive, animal-like stage of its existence. The virtue of art and culture was that they came second, after a first nature, correcting for the deficiencies of a first nature. Art and culture constituted a cultivating process that transformed wild buds into a more civilized second nature. “The quality of a barbarian . . . would be natural to men unless a good education corrected for it,” wrote Furetière.59 The role of culture was to provide that “good education” to counteract the propensity to slip toward the animal and the barbaric. In short, the imitative arts of culture had to fabricate what I call a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness. The cultural secondarity would function as a boundary against sliding back into the first stage. By virtue of distancing oneself from the animal or a natural firstness, art and culture were part of the civilizing process. Rousseau would of course latter challenge this view in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. The French Academy was an official institution that would help provide that buffer against the primitive. It would generate a cultural secondarity to insulate the human against a regressive slide toward the sauvage. What lay waiting at the very bottom of that slippery continuum was a state of nature such as the relations de voyage had described (and as Hobbes would later present in a much more negative version). The French Academy insisted on instituting a vast set of rules (much more so than at any other period in French cultural history) designed to function like the absolutist state—to keep at bay the barbarian within. In regulating how French dramatists should imitate the Ancients, these rules provided a defensive bulwark against the backward state that the Amerindians represented. By imitating the Ancients, French arts and letters were a key mechanism to protect the civilized world, differentiating it from that of the sauvage. Hobbes asked in his Elements of Law: “How do we differ from the wildest of Indians” without the development of the arts and sciences? Hobbes used “the barbarity of the

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American sauvages” to help “distinguish the civility of Europe.”60 Arts and letters constituted a last line of defense against the barbaric impulses within the human. The French Academy sought to ensure that the arts and letters guarded against the danger from below in several ways. It tried to regulate Le Cid’s characters to make sure they had the correct feelings. Furetière’s dictionary defined “barbarian” in terms of people with inappropriate feelings: “A father is barbaric when he has no kindness for his children.”61 Improperly socialized, barbarians had incorrect feelings that came out of a natural firstness, thus making them unfit for civil society. Scudéry criticized Le Cid’s heroine Chimène for having “cruel and barbaric sentiments . . . that horrify me” and called her a “Monstre,”62 objecting that she did not hate Rodrigue after he had killed her father, as she should have. Scudéry argued that Chimène was like a prostitute when she offered to marry whoever won the duel: “She tells him a hundred things worthy of a whore.”63 At every turn, her emotional responses did not follow the proper guidelines for the heart. Scudéry condemned each character in the play for having the wrong feelings, which he deemed barbaric. It was as if the French Academy were constructing a dictionary of feelings, authorizing those that emerged from a cultural secondarity and correcting for those that came first, from nature. But even the educated elite could not trust their own spontaneous feelings. Their judgments had to be mediated through a cultural secondarity. France’s educated elite had to value their second, culturally trained feelings over their first, immediate reactions. Ideally the critic did not judge a play when he was directly before it. He distanced himself from the stimulus both spatially and temporally. He would read it in his cabinet, a secluded space that was removed from the direct stimulation of the play itself. Only in this way would one not be deceived by one’s senses, avoiding the “dizzying effects of the theater.”64 The best judgments were made “in a room where silence, solitude and time will permit you to examine more precisely this criminal [Rodrigue],” wrote Scudéry in Le trompeur puni 1635.65 Chapelain confirmed the same need for distance from the immediacy of one’s primitive reactions when he praised Scudéry’s play Didon: “It delighted me on paper, which is the touchstone for these types of beauty and . . . in my cabinet, I gave it the rank that it had previously held in the world.”66 The schools where good judgment was formed were in “the most dignified studies [cabinets] of Paris”67 as Jean de Mairet had put it in his Epître familière. This cabinet for judging dramatic plays was analogous to Descartes’ poele, the insulated place,

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protected from the deceitful powers of one’s senses. Reason had to discipline one’s raw instincts. Not only critics but writers themselves should value a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness, went the argument. They should not trust their first drafts. “Nothing was ever conceived perfectly on the first try, and the best opinions were never the first ones,” wrote Scudéry.68 He disagreed with Aristotle who “assures us that the most beautiful and best things were created first.” Scudéry insisted that “it is not so for all productions.”69  Because art comes second, it transforms nature, which is “without a doubt marvelous . . . but it must be that Art is even more so, because it improves upon Nature.”70 Thus, in every aspect of art, that which comes second can correct for the defective impulses of a natural firstness. Paul Valéry would later confirm such an understanding of classical art: “The essence of classicism is to come afterward. Composition, which is an artifice, comes after a primitive chaos of intuitions and natural developments.”71 But why was such a natural firstness so base? Where did the danger come from? The mistrust of one’s natural instincts certainly came from the Christian tradition, with its discourse of sin and the fall from Grace.72 But this explanation does not provide a full account, since the French Academy’s solution was anti-Christian. Nicolas Faret’s Projet de l’Académie sought to “enrich our Language with the ornaments that it lacks.”73 In suggesting that ornaments should promote the human, Faret was not advancing a Christian ideal. For him, the source of the danger was from the barbarian below. Those who refused the ornaments of eloquence were like New World barbarians; they “confuse glory . . . and pass off their crudeness and barbarism for virile beauty and natural grace.”74 Such people, wrote Faret, “deserve to be covered in animal skins instead of in gold and silk, and live only in forests and cabins instead of in cities and houses, and who are thus blindly in love with Nature’s original simplicity.”75 Here he clearly evoked the stereotypical image of the New World barbarian to represent the negative ideal. Those who did not adorn themselves or their language were like dangerous creatures from below. The “first simplicity of Nature” was to be shunned because it resembled the bestial. Language was a strong rampart to protect the human from slipping into an animal-like state. Perfecting the French language took on such great importance, said Faret, because “by speech, God made the most clear distinction between the nature of men and that of beasts, after having given us Reason and illuminating our souls with rays of His Divinity. This gift of Reason might seem much less than it is and would not help us

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as much as it does if we were not given the ability to express our thoughts. If this part is so essential, and if it is through speech that certain men seem sometimes to be greater than others, reducing these lesser men to the level of beasts, then we must take great care to elevate speech to its most perfect form.”76 Language itself constituted a defense against the barbarian within. It was the last outpost against the wilderness, serving as a barrier to demarcate and shield the civilized from the sauvage. Like Boileau in his insult to Perrault, Faret conjured up the stereotypical image of the New World sauvage as the specter of what needed to be kept at bay. By imitating the Ancients, the French language, and the nation more broadly, would protect itself against the danger from below. Thus far, I have sought to show how France’s emerging cultural identity evolved to respond to the colonial dilemma on the lower end of the spectrum to protect against the danger from below. The relations portrayed the sauvages as fundamentally similar to the French in order to make plausible their progression along the continuum and to enable their transformation into French Catholics. Moreover, the discourse of similarity was also designed to legitimate France’s claim to evangelize/colonize/civilize their “brothers” or “kin” in the absence of a papal sanction. But by opening up the nation and the notion of Frenchness to the other, the assimilationist discourse of similarity created a corresponding crisis of similarity with the sauvage, placing the nation at risk for regression. The cultural ideal of the “classical” thus cultivated as many cultural differences as possible, emphasizing extremes of refinement and elegance, to distance a notion of Frenchness from the primitive. Shielding the nation from a natural firstness, the French Academy imposed an elaborate set of rules on its art to assure that French culture was not barbarian, even though the nation was open, at least theoretically, to beings deemed sauvage.

Imitation and Reversing the Colonial/Cultural Hierarchy France’s dominant cultural ideal emerged also to respond to the problem of decolonizing from the Ancients, who represented a danger from above. The classical ideal emerged in France to negotiate the elite’s conflicting needs: to be Ancient Rome, to smash it and also replace it. This section will highlight the antagonistic, colonial dynamic of imitation. Typically imitation implies a power relationship that places the imitator in a position of subordination and

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inferiority relative to its model. To emancipate themselves from their Ancient models, many French lettrés sought to reverse that hierarchy by reframing imitation as an act of aggression. To be sure, scholars have long examined how many lettrés imagined their act of borrowing as a form of theft or a hostile act of appropriation. I am, however, pushing the notion of aggression one step further to claim that the elite sought to reverse the hierarchy of imitation by framing their borrowing as an act of colonial domination. Rather than assume a similarity with the Ancients, many French writers affirmed their differences, highlighting them as superior. In brief, the classical ideal emerged partly as a defense against the danger from above, the Ancients as an imperial “them” from whom the elite needed to decolonize. Du Bellay urged his fellow writers to understand imitation in an aggressive, combative spirit, appropriating Greek and Roman treasures to liberate the nation’s world of letters from their dependence on the Ancients at the end of his Défense.77 “Now, by the Grace of God, through many perils and foreign storms, we have finally arrived at a safe harbor. We have escaped from the midst of the Greeks, and using Roman swords, penetrated into the heart of our much-desired France. Up then, Frenchmen! March forth courageously on that proud Roman city; and use the captured spoils (as you have done before) to adorn your temples and altars. . . . Attack that lying Greece to sow there once again the word of the celebrated nation of Gallo-Greeks.”78 Far from regarding the Ancients as benign ancestors, passing on the torch of enlightenment in a peaceful transfer according to a translatio studii, Du Bellay grabbed that torch in a hostile appropriation, urging a plundering of the Greco-Roman spoils. He diminished the Greeks by seeing them as liars, the source of great “peril” stirring up “foreign storms” for the French. While he urged imitation, du Bellay understood it partly as a form of theft. He wanted the French to pillage the most sacred treasures of the Greeks and Romans and dispossess these masters of their power. Many seventeenth-century writers intensified this aggressive spirit by framing their borrowing as an act of colonial conquest and urging an appropriation of Greco-Roman treasures. Louis Le Laboureur’s struggle to value the French language in Avantages de la langue française sur la langue latine (1669) reversed the hierarchy of imitation by placing the borrower in the predatory position of dominance, not inferiority. Feigning indifference to the origin of words, he argued that the French had more important things to do than invent words: “Our language can’t be bothered with inventing words; it is an annoyance rather than an honor that our language leaves willingly to

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others, to whom it likes to go to chose and then afterwards fashion them to its own usage.”79 Perched atop their pedestals, the French could swoop down at the last minute to scoop up the choice morsels and let others have the crumbs. Le Laboureur acknowledged that the French had already borrowed many words which “do not belong to us as our own, and that we have drawn them from foreign sources, particularly in the domain of the Latins.”80 The origin did not count. What mattered was how one used words, not who first invented them. If the French language discovered some good words, it “grabbed hold of them immediately and appropriated them so well that they did not seem to have been invented by other nations, which then came afterwards to offer their service.”81 It was as if other languages were like servants to a French master. As colonizers, the French were superior to the Romans, according to Le Laboureur. Whereas the Roman conquerors plundered for silver and gold, the French pursued a treasure of words “in our military expeditions, either in Italy, Spain or in Greece, in Asia and Africa. We came back from them more loaded with glory than spoils; and with all of the honor that we had brought back from these trips, we have kept many terms and many phrases that we have since preserved, like talking traces of former victories.”82 Putting the borrower in the colonizer’s position, Le Laboureur likened the acquisition of new words to the assimilation of people. “Whether words originated from Athens or Rome or Madrid or Florence, they have the same privileges as if they had been born in the Louvre. France treats them as her own children, and makes no distinction among them. . . . Just as the French easily welcome strangers, they also welcome their terms with the same facility.”83 At first, words constituted a form of otherness, much like the inhabitants of colonized lands. But soon France transformed these words, breaking their ties to their former tongue. In an anthropomorphism that portrayed words as subject to the colonial process, Le Laboureur claimed that the borrowed words were happiest in the French tongue, preferring it over their language of origin. His notion of imitation thus mirrored France’s colonial policy of assimilation, which in turn mirrored Rome’s colonial policy of assimilating the Gauls. But despite Le Laboureur’s claims of independence, his haughty rhetoric simply reaffirmed the Greco-Roman hold over the French imagination. Similarly, Nicolas Faret, in his Projet de l’Académie, understood imitation as a retaliatory aggression against the Ancients for their memory theft. Using a language of succession, heritage, and transfer, Faret then created a distance because this transfer was not a gift from the Ancients but a retaliatory theft.

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“As one is only rich from the spoils of others, who prevents us from placing them [the Greeks and Romans] as our prey and from transferring for our own usage all the treasures which are open to us in their Writings?”84 After evoking the Roman’ theft of the Gauls’ memory, Faret proposed an alternative narrative for this past. He turned this power dynamic on its head by imagining the French in the dominant position of conqueror and the Greco-Romans as their prey. He argued that the French should aggressively steal the treasures of their writings, viewing them as spoils and plunder. According to Dominique Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), France’s cultural differences made them superior to the Romans, and outshone them as colonizers. The Romans had to force the peoples of the world to learn Latin, imposing their language on the colonized after a military conquest. France’s cultural imperialism was superior because the peoples of the world spoke French before their conquest and of their own free will: “It is something glorious for our nation . . . that the French language was in vogue in the capital of the Low Countries before French domination was established. The Latin language came after the Roman conquests; but I do not see that it has ever preceded them. The nations that these conquerors had vanquished learned Latin in spite of themselves. Instead now those people who have not yet been subdued by France learn French voluntarily” (my emphasis).85 Foreigners learned the French language “almost as soon as their own, out of a secret instinct that warns them that despite themselves one day they will obey the King of France, accepting him as their legitimate master.”86 Once they had learned French, they “neglected their natural language entirely and prided themselves on never having learned it.”87 Bouhours imagined the day when “all languages would be reduced to one.”88 Of course, that language would be French, so that “all people could communicate and understand each other in the way we do.”89 French would provide the thought structures through which all peoples would understand themselves. French culture dominated by insinuating itself into the hearts and minds of people the world over, acting on their feelings, restructuring their souls so they would identify with the French and against their own ancestral heritage. France replaced Ancient Rome and acquired its colonial power so effectively that it dominated the world without lifting a finger. The dazzling power of its arts and letters substituted for military arms. France’s world of letters served as a magnet, making people everywhere clamor to speak French and be part of its world. As Bouhours put it, “All foreigners who have any spirit are proud to know the French language . . . there are hardly any

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countries in Europe where French is not understood.” He then expanded his claims beyond Europe: “[French] is in current use among the sauvages of America and among the most civilized nations of Asia.”90 The king of Persia, eager to promote commercial relations with France, insisted that “the Persians study French with an incredible ardor. I suspect that the Chinese and Japanese also study it, since there are French people among them. . . . [I]f the French language is not yet the tongue of all people in the world, it seems to me that it deserves to be.”91 French culture was beating the Romans at their own game, one-upping them in a rivalry of colonial expansion as a mark of cultural greatness. This defensive tactic did not lead very far out of France’ colonial bind because the retaliatory reversal was by definition still attached to the Ancients. This approach may have loosened the thread, but became twisted in a new way. Usurpation was still a form of clinging, since the French elite imitated their former master’s basic structure of domination; they had simply changed the players. Because France’s notion of its own cultural greatness had a built-in colonial power, its cultural self-understanding was still surreptitiously linked to Rome, keeping alive what many lettrés had hoped to bury. Given that the French notion of independence was itself dependent on Greco-Roman thought structures, the men of letters were unable to grasp and truly appreciate the genuine greatness they had actually achieved. Defending oneself is quite different from being defensive. To defend oneself effectively, it is necessary to stand fully on one’s own ground. If one wobbles and slips into the accusers’ camp by accepting their assumptions, then one’s defense shades into a defensiveness. The French defenders did not stand fully on French soil. They had only one foot on it; the other was perched on Roman ground, internalizing Roman beliefs about the Gauls/French as inferior. Accordingly, these defenders all harbored two conflicting stances at the same time, vacillating between an aggressiveness and a fearful dependence and inadequacy. As much as these writers argued for the strength of France’s world of letters, their histrionic defensiveness suggests that they wrote from an unstated position of assumed weakness. Thus, Du Bellay’s aggressive charge against the Ancients came after he had exhorted his readers not to feel shame in a series of overwrought rhetorical questions: “Are we, then, less than the Greeks and Romans, we who make so light of ours?. . . Why then are we such great admirers of others? Why are we so unjust to ourselves? Why do we beg from other tongues as if we were ashamed to use our own?”92 Similarly, Le Laboureur’s histrionic rhetoric of independence was a disguised form of

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attachment. And Faret’s proposal for a retaliatory theft was mixed in with his assumption that the French language was still inadequate because its greatness lay in some indeterminate future: “We want it to gain enough force to one day equal the magnificence of the Ancients. French is not incapable, as some would have it, of attaining the heights of such a difficult enterprise.”93 Expressing a mixture of alliance and distance, he continued: “And would it not be an even greater marvel if it [the French language] succeeded Latin.”94 His use of the conditional tense conjures up a fantasy rather than something real. “Who prevents us from taking them as our prey?”95 he asked, as if France’s newly acquired grandeur might not be completely believable. It is as if his puffedup posturing loses air, punctured by his childlike amazement at turning the power dynamic on its head. Faret wrote from an unstable subject position that both resented the Ancients and wanted to become them, thus reinstituting the very alignment he wanted to break. As for Bouhours, he did not chart a new, independent path. He simply wanted France to become a new, improved Rome, to replace them on the same pedestal. Many French lettrés were at war within themselves, writing from a wavering position that straddled opposing stances toward the Ancients. Their modern side aligned itself with an independent French world of letters, and against the Ancients, urging an aggression against an imperial “them.” Their ancient side identified with the Ancients, longing to see them as an “us.” This ancient side internalized the imagined Greco-Roman disdain of the French language and assumed that the nation’s world of letters was weak, preventing the lettrés from looking to their own nation as a true center. Vacillating in their stance toward imitation, many lettrés were confused about whether the Ancients were an “us” or a “them.” This split accounts for their contradictory shifts concerning imitation and explains why their defenses could not provide a true or solid escape from the colonial bind of the nation’s past. In sum, the cultural ideal that scholars have labeled “classical” emerged, in part, to negotiate the nation’s identity in between two different colonial dilemmas: (1) to decolonize from the Ancient World and respond to the danger from above; (2) to colonize the New World and respond to the danger from below. Certainly this struggle resulted in the creation of a remarkable cultural greatness. To state the obvious, the nation’s intellectuals created a highly evolved and dignified world of letters. Objectively speaking, the classical era represents a high point in the nation’s culture, with the work of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Descartes, and Pascal constituting “classics,” in the sense of a greatness that transcends time. These works are now central to France’s

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cultural identity. But while the power of these accomplishments is abundantly clear from the distance of the intervening centuries, many intellectuals of the time were much less confident in their culture than the excessive boastfulness of their official rhetoric would indicate. Subjectively, they still felt the haunting presence of their barbaric past and struggled to slip out from beneath that shroud. The underlying logic of the classical ideal examined in this chapter, however, did succeed in laying the groundwork for an escape from the colonial bind, but in a limited way. A key move of the classical ideal was to value a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness, and more broadly, to privilege that which came second over that which came first. This mode of thought had two important consequences. First, it provided an underlying structure that supported the assimilation of the New World sauvage. This mode of thought meant that the first and natural body that the Amerindians were born into, with all their various differences, physiological, religious, cultural, etc, did not define who they were or what they were capable of. Their natural differences were simply the mark of a first, primitive state of being which could be transcended. French culture, coming second, could correct this first state and reduce the significance of their differences, eliminating them and forging a new, universalizing ground of similarity. Through the properties of French culture, outsiders could be reborn, in a move akin to conversion, transformed to pass as French Catholics and become members of the nation’s expanding universal community. All humans, regardless of their first birth, could be born again into a second, cultural identity, all made to form part of the same universal (French) whole. Second, the underlying logic of the classical ideal offered a crucial first step toward decolonizing from the Ancient World. In valuing a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness, this logic laid the groundwork for reversing the slope of history by viewing a later moment as an improvement over the first, as the next chapter will develop. However, the classical ideal could not consciously embrace such an implication since, by definition, it privileged the past, viewing the Ancient World as the high point of human civilization. It still subscribed fundamentally to the Greco-Roman definition of civilization and to their notion that nature and history were degenerative. Thus, the classical path could not lead very far out of the bind. Nevertheless, it laid a suggestive conceptual foundation for a new route. The proposed path to escape the colonial bind examined in this chapter was still caught in a binary opposition; the elite sought independence by

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simply reversing the original power dynamic without changing the underlying structure. To truly escape the bind, the French elite needed a third element that would allow them to think beyond a polar opposition to the Ancients. The New World would provide that third element by enabling the elite to redefine the meaning of civilization and to reverse the degenerative slope of nature and history. The following chapter analyzes that third escape route, which helped the elite to conceive of a logic that would make possible the Enlightenment and the modern world.

chapter 8

Using the Sauvage as a Lever to Decolonize France from the Ancients

In the beginning, all the world was America. —John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1680–90) Whoever considers the Amerindians of this day, not only studies the manners of a remote present nation, but he studies, in some measure, the antiquities of all nations. —Edmund Burke, An Account of European Settlements in America (1777)

Sauvages on the Seine In a Disneyland special avant la lettre, the inhabitants of Rouen in 1550 imported “fifty natural sauvages”1 from Brazil to replicate an actual Brazilian village.2 In a gesture that would have made Walt Disney proud, 250 French sailors were painted red to resemble the Tupinambas. But in a very un-Disneyesque touch, they were all completely naked, “without at all covering the part that nature requires.”3 These French replicas were “fashioned and equipped like American sauvages”4 and supposedly resembled them so completely that they were indistinguishable. As one chronicler of this spectacle wrote, the French imitators “having frequently traveled to the country, . . . spoke the language and imitated the gestures and manners of sauvages, as if they were natives of that same country.”5 In this tableau vivant, sauvages went about what was supposedly their typical life. Some chased after monkeys who were climbing up trees—also painted red to resemble Brazilian trees. Others were 199

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more industriously employed, cutting brazilwood and carrying it to a fort constructed on the Seine. French sailors loaded it onto a ship whose sail pictured the fleur de lis. The Tupinambas exchanged commodities peacefully with French traders. This scenario was part of the 1550 royal entry that Rouen’s inhabitants had staged to celebrate and welcome Henry II and Catherine de Medici to their fair city. This festival’s theme was France’s journey from barbarism to civilization, as Aaron Michael Wintroub has shown. Henry II, its chief spectator, was also its lead actor. He led his entourage away from the primitive, barbarian existence of the Brazilian village and into the civilized world of Rouen, a city transformed into the Elysian Fields of a terrestrial paradise. In the city was a Garden of Eden with a cornucopia of trees, shrubs, flowers, herbs, fruits, and vines. In the middle stood a statue of Henri’s father, François I. One ambassador, describing the royal entry, praised François I “for having restored letters and saved [Rouen] from barbarism.” The festival was designed, in part, to urge Henry II to do the same. It placed the king in a larger, messianic role of leading all the peoples of the world, not just those of France, toward civilization.6 I describe this spectacular royal entry to introduce the third escape route out of barbarism raised by the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This proposed path reconfigured the nation’s relations to both the New World and the Ancient World yet again. But in this reconfigured narrative, the sauvage acquired positive meanings and was not the enemy. The Tupinambas were France’s allies in a mock sea battle against a common enemy—the Portuguese. This scenario exalted the Tupis’ superior martial spirit, exemplifying the same chivalrous ideals of bravery and military skill as France’s noblesse d’épée. One chronicler of the extravaganza praised the Tupinambas’ courage, emphasizing that their military accomplishments “surpassed the skills of Meryonez the Greek and Pandarus the Trojan.”7 In contrast to the Tupis’ alliance with the French, the Ancients took on more negative meanings. This chapter examines the most successful escape route out of the bind from the nation’s colonized past. The moderns charted out their path by reversing the slope of history to imagine the notion of an evolutionary and historical progress. The moderns built their path upon the key move of the classical ideal discussed in the previous chapter which valued a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness. By virtue of coming second, the work of culture and art could harness, control and improve upon the deficiencies inherent in the primitive impulses of a first nature. But this revaluing of second cultural stage over a wilder first nature was only a first step that did not lead very far out of the bind

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because the classical ideal was still, by definition, turned toward the past. The classical ideal was still rooted in a Greco-Roman ideology, accepting its understanding of civilization and subscribing to its fundamental assumption that history and nature were slanted downward toward decline. As long as history and nature were seen as degenerative, the French imitation of the Ancients was doomed to inadequacy and fear of barbarism. Nothing the French imitators could do would ever allow them to equal their esteemed models. The moderns achieved the decisive break from the Greco-Roman ideology by using the New World as a lens through which to look at the Ancient World. The two previous chapters showed how the first two proposed escape routes fell back into a vicious circle because they were based on imitation. What the humanist-educated elite were imitating were beliefs and values that reinforced the elite’s initial fears of barbarism and inadequacy. Moreover, the dynamics of imitation locked the elite into a binary opposition to the Greeks and Romans, in which their major choices were either to claim a sameness with their Ancient models or insist on a false separateness that reversed the model/copy power dynamic and sought to replace the Greeks and Romans. The moderns broke out of this binary opposition by looking to the New World as a third term. The sauvage and the New World became important conceptual levers that made possible a new kind of logic: it reversed the slope of history so that the future improved upon the past rather than fell away from it. This decisive shift thus sounded the true death-knell for a humanism whose shadowy presence continued to haunt many seventeenth-century writers, long after its supposed end in the sixteenth century. This third escape route, then, carved out the modern path that ultimately liberated the nation’s world of letters, opening up a road that led to the Enlightenment and beyond.

An Expanded Notion of the Modern The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, as well as the category “modern” itself, was not limited to France’s world of letters. The Quarrel engaged questions pertaining to the nation’s commercial, economic, scientific, and technological ventures.8 The royal entry into Rouen emphasizes how commerce staged a notion of the modern, one which deeply affected France’s world of letters. Commerce constituted an important arena in which the appeal of the modern held particularly great sway. To produce the Rouen festival, the city’s merchants and humanists had to work together. They represented

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two interest groups that collaborated with a third, made up of members of France’s old feudal elite, the noblesse d’épée. Together they formed a central committee to write, produce, and stage the royal entry, as Wintroub has analysed.9 Although each group used this festival as an opportunity to lobby the king to promote its own needs and values, they all had to agree on a central narrative. They chose an abstract narrative of the trajectory from barbarism to civilization. Its abstractness meant the groups did not need to specify what the sauvage and the civilized meant. Moreover, the qualities that embodied them and the path by which the journey progressed from the former to the latter could all remain open questions. These ambiguities were left unexplored, permitting the possibility of an agreement because the groups were not asked to spell out their exact meaning. The merchants understood civilization quite differently from the way France’s world of letters did. To them, civilization did not lie in the past; rather, it was linked to the rise of commercial activity, which would help chart out a new path toward a civilized future. The merchants contested the chief values that the ancients in the Quarrel had associated with the Ancient World. The lucrative benefits of commercial activity with the New World were what gave merchants their power and social mobility. Thus, they wanted to revalue commerce, which historically had been viewed as the quintessential barbaric activity—which was why the noblesse d’épée, the old feudal elite, was barred from participating in it.10 With the rise of commerce, Rouen was investing heavily in trade, particularly with the New World. Some of France’s earliest contacts with the New World came from Normandy, as Wintroub has demonstrated.11 Cod fishers from Rouen, Honfleur, and Dieppe frequently traveled to Newfoundland. The people of Rouen became accustomed to seeing inhabitants from the New World in their city, as when Captain Thomas Aubert brought back seven Amerindians to Rouen in 1508 to parade them in the city in an effort to stir up interest in the Americas. Soon afterward, a nobleman from Honfleur, Paulmier de Gonneville, who had spent six months in Brazil engaging in trade, returned to France with the Amerindian boy he had adopted as his son.12 He gave the boy his family name and then married him to his daughter. Gonneville’s adopted son, a Brazilian sauvage turned Frenchman, was highly regarded in Normandy and came to be a legend. Rouen’s merchants soon became increasingly dependent on the New World’s resources.13 Beginning in the 1520s, the merchants traded extensively with Brazil for monkeys, birds, and cotton. But their greatest interest was in several different kinds of wood. One of these was particularly prized because

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of its ability to produce a striking, intense red dye. Many Norman ships traveled back and forth to Brazil, and a glance at one ship’s cargo from 1531 conveys the extensive range of the kinds of commodities that were sought after. It contained 15,000 quintaux of brazilwood, 300 quintaux of cotton, 600 parakeets, which already knew a few words of French, 3,000 skins of leopards and other animals, 300 monkeys, gold worth roughly 3,000 ducats, and about 1,000 ducats in medicinal oils, all worth about 602,300 ducats.14 Thus when Rouen’s merchants welcomed Henry II to their city in 1550, they used the festival to lobby the king to help them overcome obstacles to their trade with the New World. Since 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas had divided up the New World into two sections, granting Portugal exclusive dominion over one section and Spain exclusive dominion over the other. The Portuguese had jealously guarded this privilege and wanted to prevent other nations from encroaching on “their” territory. Rouen’s merchants lobbied Henri II to contest the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly in the New World and to challenge the papal bull forbidding France to evangelize, colonize, or trade in the region, under penalty of excommunication.15 Hence the Rouen festival glorified the benefits of trade, showcasing the commodities from the New World. The festival elevated commerce to art, one that did not require an imitation of the Ancients. Commerce and the New World sauvage were the real stars of the royal entry and played an important role in redefining what civilization meant. With an economic interest in Brazil, the French elite did not subscribe to a simple barbarism/civilization opposition: the Tupinambas were France’s friends, and the Portuguese were its enemies.16 They redefined the notion of civilization so it did not fall into a binary opposition; civilization did not require that the barbaric be stamped out. While the sauvage designated a space outside civilization that was wild and unharnessed, the entire goal of civilization was precisely to incorporate and harness that raw potential. (Analogously, Descartes would later develop a method to “render men the masters and possessors of nature” in his Discourse on Method.)17 The sauvage world and the civilized world were interdependent, although ultimately the civilized would exploit the sauvage.

From the Barbarian to the Sauvage: The Problem of Differences We must cultivate our garden. — Voltaire, Candide (1759)

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The Rouen merchants were not the only group to look to the New World and the sauvage as a way out of the bind that locked them in battle against the Ancients. A number of French intellectuals came to think beyond the binary opposition by reflecting on the notion of the sauvage that the New World represented. However, they felt more conflicted in their stance towards the Ancients than their commercially oriented counterparts because they were essentially creatures of the book. Trained in the Latinate seclusion of schools and universities, the French humanist-educated elite had largely limited their mental world to the knowledge found in their personal libraries. But their contact with men of travel and their relations did help many of the humanisteducated elite to transcend the categories of their restricted mental world.18 The foundations for a truly successful, modern escape route in the world of letters existed as early as Joachim du Bellay in a subtle and incipient form, although he did not follow this path himself. Just one year before the Rouen inhabitants staged their festival in 1550, he laid the groundwork for the modern path in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). To defend against the charge of barbarism, his strategy took a curious tack. It hinged on a deceptively simple metaphorical shift. Du Bellay argued that the French language was not barbaric; rather, it was sauvage. He used this shift to reinterpret the significance of the French language’s many differences from its Ancient models. French humanists had long been plagued by the problem of the differences between the vernacular and Latin and also Greek. They feared those differences were marks of inferiority and barbarism. Du Bellay began his argument by conceding that the French language was indeed inferior to Latin because it was like a “sauvage plant.” Developing this image, he argued that it had been abandoned in “that same uncultivated [desert] place where it was born.” No one ever “watered it, pruned it, or protected it from brambles and thorns that shaded it,” and “they had let it grow old and nearly die.”19 Du Bellay used this image of the sauvage plant to suggest that French was simply uncultivated. It was not by nature inferior, forever fixed in a position of insufficiency. This metaphorical shift from the barbarian to a sauvage plant will probably at first glance seem innocuous and insignificant. However, I would contend that Du Bellay’s use of the “sauvage plant” metaphor helped launch a new line of thinking about difference and otherness that provided an escape from the Greco-Roman binary logic. In giving weight to this metaphorical shift from the barbarian to the sauvage, I am presupposing that thought can proceed meaningfully and powerfully through metaphor. As several scholars

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have shown, metaphorical thinking is a prerational, intuitive kind of logic that catches ideas on the fly, and makes fleeting connections that are often a few steps ahead of the rational mind.20 Because intuitive leaps are not usually constrained by the conventional categories of rationality that trap thought in old mental structures, they can give flight to unexpected revolutionary changes of logic. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that all metaphorical leaps have such power, nor that they are necessarily conscious. However, this particular metaphorical shift, I would argue, laid the groundwork for a major paradigm shift that would ultimately enable the humanist-educated elite to decolonize France from the Ancient World. This shift gained traction over time since he and many other men of letters who followed in the seventeenth century built this simple metaphor into a larger agricultural discourse that worked to achieve the same goal. To explore the significance of the shift from the barbarian to the sauvage, it is important to understand the crucial differences between these two terms. They are often used interchangeably, conjuring up similar connotations of cruelty and inferiority. But one decisive difference separated their meanings in early modern France. “Barbarian” almost invariably had a negative meaning; it suggested not simply inferiority but also an unalterable essence as inferior. We recall that the term “barbarian” derived its negative meaning from its Greek origin, barbaros, referring to the non-Greek-speaking person, as discussed in Chapter 2. The Greek world allowed for little social mobility and fixed outsiders in a space largely outside the bounds of civilization. Because outsiders did not know Greek, they did not have access to the highest forms of reason and were thus essentially inferior. The term sauvage, however, suggests the possibility for cultivation and growth, rendering it capable of inclusion in the civilized community. The term comes from the Latin, salvaticus, meaning “of the woods.” Rooted in the greater social mobility of the Roman world, the sauvage could grow and change through cultivation. Outsiders could become insiders and be incorporated within the order of the civitas. Furetière later highlighted this etymological meaning in his Dictionnaire universel (1690), defining the term as “opposed to the cultivated.”21 Sauvage refers to “plants and trees, and designates those which grow naturally in the forest, or in the countryside, in contrast to those that are cultivated in gardens . . . a fruit has a savage taste when it is coarse and bitter, when it has not been cultivated to make it sweet. One can also speak of a wild country when it is mountainous, sterile and not cultivated.”22 Furetière’s dictionary also stated: “Sauvage: there is no beast so sauvage that one cannot tame it with skill and patience when

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one raises it from its youth.”23 Furetière’s definition applied to humans, not simply to plants and animals. In this context, differences signified that one was under-developed because of external circumtances. Differences did not result from or reflect a fixed essence. This understanding of differences reflected the etymological meaning of sauvage as uncultivated and served as the foundation for conceptualizing the other. It was consonant with the social mobility of the Roman worldview because outsiders could be civilized. Du Bellay used this notion of sauvage to defend the French language and argued that its current differences and deficiencies resulted from a lack of “cultivation,” rather than from any intrinsic qualities. Its admitted “infertility” and even “sterility” resulted “not from any defect in its nature,” but because France’s humanists “have not sufficiently tended to it.”24 Unfortunately the French plant, until Du Bellay’s time, had been neglected. But if cultivated, it could grow to reach a greatness equivalent to that of Greek or Latin. Du Bellay thus grounded his defense in an underlying agricultural discourse, which reframed the differences of the French language in terms of future growth and harvest. However, he did not root this growth in nature, as one might logically expect. This agricultural discourse was anchored, paradoxically, in culture. Nature itself was part of the problem, since it was the site where the greatest differences arose. Natural differences led Du Bellay to question “whether we should call [Nature] mother or stepmother.”25 Etymologically, the term “culture” evolved out of agriculture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “culture” referred essentially to the cultivation of the earth,26 and it compensated for the defects found in nature. Latin flowered, wrote Du Bellay, because the Romans were “more diligent in the cultivation of their languages than we are in that of ours.”27 French had been relatively “infertile” until Du Bellay’s time because of “the ignorance of our ancestors.”28 While the French garden had been neglected, it was capable of cultivation “by means of the industry and diligence of its cultivators.”29 The Romans were good models because they were “good farmers,”30 tending to their little buds. They “first transplanted [the bud] from a wild to a cultivated site. Then, so that it might yield fruit better and more quickly, pruning away the useless branches, they replaced them with fine and cultivated branches, taken in masterly fashion from the Greek language, which were rapidly so well grafted to their trunk and made to resemble it that from that time on they have no longer appeared adopted but natural.”31 From the Romans’ diligence “were born in the Latin language those flowers and those fruits colored with great

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eloquence.”32 In short, Du Bellay’s agricultural discourse enabled him to conceptualize the differences of French in terms of a future growth, not as an essence that fixed the language forever in an inferior position to its models: “our language, which is just beginning to flower without bearing fruit, or rather, like a seedling and fresh shoot, has not yet flowered.”33 Having turned over a new leaf, so to speak, French was entering a new cycle of growth, “the French language, which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and grow to such height and girth that it will equal the Greeks and Romans themselves, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros.”34 The vernacular’s differences signified a lack of cultivation, not a natural inferiority. One day the French could aspire to be a garden/ civilization like the Romans and Greeks. “We must cultivate our garden,” is an imperative most famously linked to Voltaire’s Candide (1759); but it took on a deeper, alternative meaning as applied to decolonizing the French mind. This agricultural discourse, with its concept of the sauvage, provided the underpinnings for a broader evolutionary discourse that helped reconceptualize history as evolving toward a future that represented an advance rather than a decline from a more perfect past. This new evolutionary model of history thus enabled a different model of civilization to be built upon its foundations. Du Bellay sketched out a modest and primitive understanding of evolutionary growth. His vision was limited, since it did not point to an indefinite linear growth but to a cyclical growth. Nature was potentially fertile in all periods. This meant that the French language could reach the pinnacle of early modern France’s cycle, enabling it to equal Greek and Latin, at least in theory. This agricultural discourse thus responded to the key dilemma of understanding the differences of French without conceding an inequality and inferiority. Significantly, however, Du Bellay made this argument based on future growth, which assumed that the French language and civilization had not yet reached its cycle’s high point. He did not base his argument on the achievements the French had already reached, which were indeed considerable. Developing an evolutionary mode of thought, Du Bellay emphasized that Greek civilization emerged in a gradual process over time. The Greek language and civilization began with lowly, undeveloped origins and borrowed from the Egyptians. When their civilization finally blossomed, the Greeks then obscured their more primitive stage and created the illusion that they had invented the flower of civilization in a single moment of genius. By looking to the humble beginnings of the Greek flowering, Du Bellay offered a very different, less idealized picture. The Greeks, too, were once uncultivated buds

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like the French in the sixteenth century. Referring to the origins of French, Greek, and Latin, Du Bellay asserted that they were not fundamentally different: “They all come from a single source and origin.”35 All civilizations were on the same continuum, placed at different stages because of “la culture,” not nature. “But who would dare say that Greek and Latin were always at the level of excellence they attained at the time of Homer and of Demosthenes, of Virgil and of Cicero? And had those authors judged that, whatever diligence and cultivation were applied to those languages, they would never be able to produce greater fruit, would they have made such great efforts to bring them to the height at which we now see them?”36 Greek and Roman civilizations evolved because their thinkers had traveled to Egypt and elsewhere, borrowing from other nations to cultivate their own minds, just as the French were now turning to the Greeks and Romans. “Why then did the ancient Greeks travel through so many countries and dangers, some to the Indies to see the gymnosophists, others to Egypt to borrow from old priests and prophets those great riches of which Greece is now so proud?”37 The Greeks, at the beginning of their evolutionary cycle, were once like “sauvage plants” similar to the French in their current state. In sum, the metaphor of the sauvage gave rise to a discourse of agricultural growth that in turn laid the foundation for a discourse of evolutionary development. Du Bellay’s seemingly simple metaphor helped launch one of the most decisive shifts in the history of Western thought. That shift would eventually reverse the idea of the slope of history and nature so that they did not slant downward toward degeneration but upward toward future progress.38 I do not mean to suggest that Du Bellay alone effected this change. That was far from the case. Nor was he even necessarily conscious of what his language suggested. But his metaphors intuitively captured a mode of thinking that would be developed more rationally and systematically later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most scholars assume that the concept of progress was not articulated until the eighteenth century; however, its foundations were being laid at this earlier moment—and they began with reflections on the notion of the sauvage. These reflections led to an agricultural/evolutionary discourse designed to break out of a false and stiffling binary opposition between the barbarian and the civilized, between France and the Ancients. While the concept of the sauvage helped to decolonize the French mind from the Ancient World, it also helped the French church and state to colonize the New World. France’s assimilationist endeavor was, in theory, predicated on a positive profile of the sauvages. The relations de voyage constantly referred

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to the Amerindians as young “buds” or “plants” capable of being cultivated to grow out of their original wildness. “Their soul is a soil that is naturally good but loaded down with all the evils that a land abandoned since the birth of the world can produce.”39 “There is . . . pleasure in cultivating them to receive the seed of Christianity.”40 “The seed of the Gospel is beginning to germinate in the hearts of these Barbarians.”41 The term sauvage framed the Amerindians within a temporal scheme that positioned them simply at a primitive stage of growth. Because this stage did not fix them in permanent position, the Amerindians contained the possibility for a future that did not repeat their past. The Amerindians were sauvage because of their external circumstances, which could be changed. They inhabited a very specific kind of space that made them sauvage. Seventeenth-century dictionaries defined the sauvage as a creature who lived isolated in nature, far from other humans. The French Academy’s 1694 dictionary defined the sauvage as “a man living in solitude,” inhabiting “deserted, uncultivated, sterile and uninhabited spaces.” Outside the community, one lives as a “savage . . . as a beast rather than as a man.”42 The space of the sauvage, far from the civitas, the center of sociability, made it impossible to be fully human. Since the differences of the sauvages resulted from their particular temporal and spatial circumstances, not from a fixed essence, they were capable of becoming civilized. If one transplanted a wild “plant” into a different kind of space—the city—and into a different time—one of advanced growth—then their differences would fall away like dead leaves. These sauvages would then come to resemble French Catholics. No natural differences prevented them from being assimilated into France’s Christianized civitas.

The Heavy “Metal” Theory of the Soul The momentous impact of the metaphorical shift from the barbarian to the sauvage can be grasped more fully if we first examine how it countered another key metaphor that served as an imaginative structure underpinning the Greco-Roman intellectual concept of degeneration. This concept was imagined through what I call a “heavy metal” theory of the soul. The Greeks expressed the superiority of their civilization through metaphors of different metals, suggesting that the essence of a people was fixed, hardwired, so to speak, into their being. In Greece, its own past had a golden age because it was full of golden people, with golden souls and minds. Hesiod articulated

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this understanding of history as a degenerative succession of five ages, with a “golden race” in its furthest and most perfect past. In his Works and Days, he wrote: “At first the immortals who dwell on Olympos created a golden race of mortal men . . . and every good thing was theirs; the barley-giving earth asked for no toil to bring forth a rich and plentiful harvest.”43 Then came a second age when “the gods of Olympos made a second race—a much worse one—this time of silver, unlike the golden one in thought or looks.” After a hundred years, the “silver race” could not refrain from “reckless violence against one another” and destroyed themselves. Then “Zeus the father made a third race of mortals, this time of bronze, not at all like the silver one,” and they were “bent on harsh deeds of war and violence. . . . Bronze were their weapons, bronze their homes.”44 Hesiod lived in yet a more degraded era; he came from “the race of iron.” Someone with an iron soul could not change his essence; he could not transmute his substance into gold. Plato employed a metal imagery in the Republic through his discussion of the noble lie. In this myth, he justified why rulers should rule by claiming that their souls were mixed with gold. Next in the ruling hierarchy were the auxiliaries, who had silver mixed into their souls. Then came the copper and bronze souls. “We shall say to them in telling the tale, ‘but the god, in fashioning those of you who are competent to rule, mixed gold in at their birth, this is why they are most honored; in auxiliaries, silver; and iron and bronze in the farmers and other craftsmen.”45 No amount of cultivation could perform an alchemical change. Those who came after the Greeks, such as the French, were made of a baser metal. Having inherited the degenerative notion of nature from the Greeks, the French elite placed a premium on firstness in many instances. Those who arrived first on the scene of human (European) history were supposedly superior and made of a superior metal (mettle). This belief in the primacy of firstness was buttressed by several analogous thought structures. The law of primogeniture, for example, also privileged firstness, stipulating that the firstborn son should inherit the entire family property. While primogeniture was put in place for complex economic, social, and political reasons, it contributed to a general valuing of firstness. Analogously, the noblesse d’épée claimed superiority based on firstness. As the old feudal, military elite, they claimed superiority over the more recently arrived young upstarts, the noblesse de robe, who had bought their way in. The primacy of firstness also explains why some early modern French historians claimed the Gauls as their ancestors, asserting that the Gauls came first, before the Greeks and Romans.

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The sauvage and its agricultural/evolutionary discourse challenged the Greco-Roman metal metaphor, with its discourse of degeneration, in three ways. First, it suggested that France’s differences from its models did not have the essential hardness or fixity found in metal. Given that the Ancients achieved their superiority through “la culture” as “de bons cultivateurs,” the French could then rightly aspire to the same level of cultivation. Second, this discourse elevated a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness, highlighting the value of culture as a secondary move to “correct” the defects inherent in a first nature. Third, the notion of the sauvage, central to the agricultural/evolutionary discourse, would serve as a third element to undo the false binary opposition between France and the Ancients.

Fontenelle: From a Natural Firstness to a Cultural Secondarity Over a century after Du Bellay, Fontenelle picked up on the same basic agricultural/evolutionary discourse and pushed it further, ultimately opening up the path to the Enlightenment and a firmer and more conscious articulation of the modern. Fontenelle’s goal was to account for the dilemma of how to understand the differences between the French and the Ancients. He placed the concept of the sauvage at the heart of his logic. Like Du Bellay, he was a modern engaged in the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, although without the ambivalence of his predecessor. However, Fontenelle focused not on the vernacular but on the notion of nature’s degeneration, offering a more direct, frontal attack. In a parody of that notion in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), he attributed to the Ancients/ancients a belief that the trees of antiquity were larger and more beautiful than in France because nature was more vigorous in her youth. By the time the seventeenth century rolled around, poor Mother Nature was exhausted, having expended all her energy on the Greeks. With trees growing smaller over time, the French version was approaching the equivalent of a bonsai. Correspondingly, French thinkers and writers resembled mental pygmies. This was because Plato, Demosthenes, and Homer were formed “from a finer clay and are better prepared than our philosophes.”46 The Greeks and Romans “had more spirit than us” because “the brains of the time were better ordered, formed of more delicate or firmer fibers, full of more animal spirits.” It followed that “one only has spirit as much as one admires [the Ancients who] cannot be equaled in these last centuries.”47 With the slope of history slanting downward, the French would

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always be doomed to remain a few cuts below their models, no matter how perfectly they imitated the Ancients. Fontenelle thus asked how it was possible to understand their differences so that “the natural equality which exists between the Ancients and us” would become apparent and enable the French to be their own masters. He wanted to decolonize the French mind and its civilization from the Ancients. Like Du Bellay, Fontenelle used the concept of the sauvage as a lever to reconceptualize and explain away the differences between French writers and the Ancients. For Fontenelle, however, the sauvage was no longer a metaphorical plant but a flesh and blood creature. The sauvage referred to two different beings: first, to the earliest Greeks, whose lives, he argued, resembled those of the Native Americans; and second, to the inhabitants of the New World and of other distant parts of France’s contemporary world: the Iroquois, the Lapps, and the Caffirs (blacks from Mozambique). Exploring the concept of the sauvage, Fontenelle saw the Greeks as their quintessential embodiment. Having arrived first on the scene of (European) human history, the Greeks were once similar to the New World sauvages in that they were a first people. Their firstness meant they were crude and possessed primitive modes of thought. In describing the Greeks in De l’origine des fables, Fontenelle consistently called them “the first men”48 rather than “the Greeks.” This shift in vocabulary was designed to knock these ancient peoples off their pedestal and frame them as a subaltern other. Much of Fontenelle’s argument hangs on reversing the meaning of the Greeks’ firstness. Their greatest claim to fame was that “they were before us.”49 The Greeks, “these poor sauvages who were the first to inhabit the world,” lived in “the first centuries of the world.”50 Such firstness did not confer prestige or wisdom on them. “It would be as if one boasted about having been the first to drink the water of our rivers, and insulted us for not having drunk as much as others.”51 In fact, their firstness meant they were more subject to the errors of childhood than were the peoples who came after them. As “first men,” the Greeks did what all unformed, ignorant people did. They invented the most rudimentary and irrational forms of thought: myth. Like children, they lived in the shadows of ignorance, in the “childhood of the world.”52 In De l’origine des fables, Fontenelle proposed that France’s writers look at the Greeks through the lens of the newly discovered Amerindians. He used this new angle on history to demystify the Ancients and dethrone them by taking his contemporaries back to the moment of the Greeks in their earliest phase, when they were every bit as sauvage as the Native Americans. He

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proposed an explicit triangulated view of history. Rather than use the Ancients’ distorted lens to view the French, the elite should use the Native Americans as a lens through which to view the Ancients, highlighting their primitiveness. In this perspective, the French would appear more advanced than the Ancients. This new lens would liberate the French, enabling them to look at themselves through their own eyes at last. Fontenelle’s triangulated historical frame was inspired by his reading of the relations de voyage and their portraits of the New World inhabitants. The relations enabled him to stand history on its head by promoting an evolutionary perspective similar to what Du Bellay had suggested. Rather than view Greek civilization through its highest, most evolved stage, Fontenelle took his readers back to the beginning of history when all Greeks were akin to the New World sauvages. He emphasized their similarities by focusing on their respective myths. Based on the information the relations provided, he was struck by “an astonishing similarity between the myths of the Americans and those of the Greeks.”53 Greek myths were basically immoral and irrational, a “heap of chimeras, reveries and absurdities.”54 As such, they reflected a primitive society whose members fashioned their gods in their own image as barbarians like themselves, “cruel, bizarre, unjust, ignorant.”55 Like their Native American counterparts, the Greek myths reflected a barbaric society that valued “the force of the body”56 more than wisdom or justice. The Greeks’ world was full of giants and magicians; logic had little power over their minds. “Their Gods,” wrote Fontenelle, “are almost as brutal as they are and only a bit more powerful.”57 The similarity between their mythologies, he continued, “shows that the Greeks were once savages just as the Americans are now, and that they were taken out of the barbaric stage by the same means.”58 When the Greeks were “a new People, they did not think any more rationally than do the barbarians of America, who were also, according to all appearances, a rather new People when they were discovered by the Spanish.”59 To convey what the Greeks were once like, Fontenelle wrote: “Imagine the Caffirs, the Lapps or the Iroquois.” They all lived in “a barbarousness so extreme that we can’t even represent it.”60 If anything, the Greeks were yet even more primitive, since the Iroquois, Lapps, and Caffirs had “certainly arrived at some degree of knowledge and politeness that the first men did not have.”61 Anticipating the obvious objection that the Greeks transcended their crude first stage to develop a highly advanced civilization, Fontenelle responded by observing that their cultural and intellectual advances were grounded in the primitive thinking of their earlier stage. Greek rationality was built on top of

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the earlier, irrational foundation of Greek fables, since “we explain the unknown in nature by what we have in front of our eyes.”62 The fables of “these first men” provided faulty foundations for their sons’ “reason.” Consequently, their thought structures were shaky. Fontenelle’s readings about the Amerindians in the relations enabled him to open up the concept of the sauvage to a second definition. Like Du Bellay, Fontenelle focused on its meaning of “uncultivated” to suggest a possibility for growth within an agricultural world. “La culture,” the process of cultivating the wild, would serve as an antidote for the limits of a first nature and give it a new, improved second nature. Fontenelle applied this second understanding of the sauvage to the French themselves. In his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, he sought to understand the differences between France’s world of letters and that of the Ancients. Like Du Bellay, he minimized the significance of the natural differences that existed between peoples. He began his Digression by reflecting on the diversity of nature and argued that while many differences existed in nature and were unfortunately divisive, art and culture could level the playing field. If plants were capable of cultivation, the human mind as plant or as natural substance was even more malleable: “Art and culture can influence the brain much more than land, which is a much harder and inflexible substance.”63 While “there is more diversity between minds than between faces,” over time, the mind will change more than the face. “Thus, minds, which naturally differed as much as faces, come to be not so different.”64 Fontenelle distinguished between nature in its raw or first form, which he devalued, and nature in its cultivated or second form, which can compensate for the original differences or deficiencies. “The difference of climates should be counted for nothing, provided that the minds are cultivated.”65 The origin matters less than its cultivated state: “Thus the thoughts of a country are more easily transported to another country than is the case for its plants, and we would have less difficulty borrowing from the works of Italian genius than growing their orange trees [in France].”66 This division of nature into a primitive and a cultivated form enabled its crude origins to be forgotten over time. If the French transplanted Italian orange trees into their own soil, over time that origin would cease to matter. Similarly, the origins of France’s primitive nature would also lose their significance. Fontenelle’s agricultural discourse enabled him to suggest that no group of people was disadvantaged for having come later in history, since it could be cultivated to reach civilization. The fact of one’s firstness in a state of nature was less important than the ability to improve on it through culture. As Fontenelle wrote: “All differences,

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whatever kind, are caused by external circumstances, such as the weather, the government, the general state of affairs.”67 To compensate for natural differences, “culture” must work toward its highest end—civilization. Fontenelle thus used the concept of the sauvage to appreciate the power of culture and art to transform the primitive into a more evolved stage of being. He slipped into an evolutionary discourse, just as Du Bellay and his agricultural discourse had. However, Fontenelle pushed the evolutionary frame further by breaking out of Du Bellay’s cyclical notion of history to suggest that “the beaux esprits of a future time could be the Americans.”68 The future did not depend on imitation; it did not need to take the past as its model; rather, it could be open to an indefinitely progressive and linear evolutionary development. Contrary to the Greek view, nature could be cultivated to develop a future that not only differed from but also improved upon the past. Fontenelle’s combined agricultural/evolutionary theory enabled him to reorient the slope of history to counteract the Greek theory of degeneration. Fontenelle saw Ancient Greece as a cultural infant and placed France in “the age of virility where [France] reasons with greater force and more enlightenment than ever.”69 Science and knowledge might shift so that “one can hope to see great Lapp or Negro authors.”70 The primitive Americans would one day be more civilized than the Ancients. The American beaux esprits came alive in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts, in which he imagined a dialogue between Montezuma and Cortés. Fontenelle’s Cortés tried to convince Montezuma that “the Greeks and Romans invented all the arts and sciences.”71 Montezuma challenged this opinion by observing that the Americans had managed to build bridges and aqueducts without the Greek arts. He concluded: “It seems to me that until now you have not proven the advantages of Europe over America.”72 The Greeks and Romans were not more advanced than the American Indians but were basically similar to them. The major difference between them consisted in external formalities that supposedly marked a level of civility. Montezuma noted, “Whoever would strip Europe of its formalities would render it very similar to America.”73 Only a thin veneer of polite forms distinguished the Europeans from the Americans. Beneath the surface, the European was just like the American sauvage. Because the Greeks, once as primitive as the Amerindians, eventually created a great civilization, wrote Fontenelle in De l’origine des fables, it was possible that in the future “Americans could eventually come to think as rationally as the Greeks, if one gives them enough time.”74 He also wrote: “Put a new people on this earth, and their first stories will be fables.”75 Primitiveness would be true of any people, no matter where they were or when

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they lived. “The same ignorance produced approximately the same effects in all peoples.”76 But that ignorance would change with cultivation. The future improves on the past because history is not degenerative. The latest, not the first, is the best; “the last doctors or mathematicians should naturally be the most able.”77 Evolution exists in all domains. The notion of the sauvage was thus a key instrument that helped the moderns launch one of the most decisive shifts in the history of Western thought; it became a lever to pry loose the sedimented layers of belief inherited from the Greeks about nature and history. As we have seen, the concept of the sauvage was at the root of an agricultural discourse that rejected a natural firstness in favor of a cultural secondarity. This shift meant that the chronological position of coming second, after the firstness of nature, did not imply that France’s culture was second-rate. In fact, the opposite was true. Coming second was an asset, not a liability, especially since the resources of art could compensate for the differences of nature and perfect its defects. Fontenelle’s agricultural discourse, like that of Du Bellay, also slipped into an evolutionary discourse by situating France on a newly constructed continuum from barbarism to civilization in which the Greeks were at the bottom as cultural infants and the French occupied an advanced stage in “the age of virility.” However, Fontenelle imagined a continuum in which the French would one day become the “ancients” to the American Indians. He did not seek to reverse the hierarchy and insist that the Native Americans imitate the French. Yet when the church and state appropriated this discourse, their colonial policy would do precisely this. Fontenelle’s agricultural/evolutionary discourse helped decolonize the French mind by providing an alternative logic so that France’s differences from the Ancients did not mean that the nation was inferior. While Fontenelle did not seek to value the nation’s differences, he at least did not view them as liabilities. In revaluing the sauvage, he opened the road to decolonization from the Ancients because this primitive figure could be seen as inhabiting a rudimentary, uncultivated stage in an evolving continuum toward the ideal, not in radical opposition to the civilized. The sauvage/civilized binary opposition could begin to break down, since the sauvage was, and always had been, within the foundation of civilization itself, when seen in this light. The sauvage carved out a more ample intermediary space so that France was not simply relegated to a radical either/or position. Fontenelle’s discourse, grounded in a nature/culture opposition, was thus universalist in that it explained how the French, fearful of being outsiders, could be included within the “universe” as

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the Romans had defined it. More important, elite France could imagine itself at the center, not at the periphery, of that universe. This agricultural/evolutionary discourse would blossom more fully in the Enlightenment. For example, Voltaire’s poem Le mondain (1736), also placed the sauvage at the foundation of human society and reversed the slant of history to value the future over the past. Voltaire proudly called his own era “this century of iron,” stressing that it represented an advance over the crude and primitive past. However, that past was not a golden age; he explicitly rejected that term. The very first humans, Adam and Eve, were sauvages so primitive that they resembled animals. Voltaire imagined Adam mounting Eve like a monkey or a goat, and she then gave birth to the human race: My dear Adam, my old and sad father, I see you there in a nook of Eden Grossly forging the human race By tormenting [1736: by banging] Madame Eve, my mother; Two green monkeys, two cloven-footed goats Hiding deep in the underbrush are less hideous. Your face burnt by the sun, Your furry arms, your scaly hands, Your long fingernails, cruddy, black and clawed Your swarthy skin, hardened and scorched These are the appeal, the flattering charms, Which all together inflame your lust.78 Fortunately, the children did not seek to imitate their parents but instead became increasing refined. At first their offspring lived according to what was necessary, but soon “the superfluous” became “very necessary,” and they lived among “the arts of all kinds.” Their pleasure and happiness grew because of trade with other countries. After many centuries, these children came to live amid great luxury, abundance, and ultimately refinement due to increasing commercial activity. In short, Voltaire’s poem was about the journey of the human race from savagery to civilization, with the savage relegated to the past and civilization was a product of the present. The third escape route helped the moderns to win the war against the ancients, dethroning the Greeks and Romans and negotiating a new, independent path to greatness and a new understanding of what constitutes civilization. Its triangulated structure escaped the binary logic that held French

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intellectuals hostage to a self-denigrating mode of thought. The seed for this new logic lay in a seemingly minor, metaphorical shift from the barbarian to the sauvage. Yet this shift had a profound ripple effect, reaching far and wide, enabling the nation’s world of letters to break out of the bind of its colonized and barbaric past. As we have seen, the colonial discourse about the New World, with its concept of the sauvage, enabled the French elite to reconceptualize their cultural/colonial relationship to the Ancient World. Fontenelle structured his triangulated path like the classical ideal by opposing a natural firstness to a cultural secondarity. However, he revalued its underlying meanings. He attributed a natural firstness to the Ancients but viewed it as negative, likening the Greeks to the New World sauvages. The fact that the Ancients were first meant that they were not higher on the continuum than the French but lower, because their firstness designated a more primitive and barbaric state. Coming second was an asset because it could improve upon the past. Fontenelle reconstructed the evolutionary continuum to place the Greeks at the bottom as cultural infants, with the French above them in an “age of virility.” Paradoxically, these modern concepts of culture and of art emerged from the image of the sauvage. Because culture and art came second, after nature, they could serve as “correctives” to compensate for the differences and defects of a first birth. The moderns’ agricultural/evolutionary discourse explained away the significance of the natural differences that separated France’s cultured elite from the Ancients by reinserting them within a cultural (cultivating) frame in which their differences did not signify inferiority. This discourse sought to deny that France was an other with respect to the Ancients and to argue for a fundamental sameness. As Fontenelle wrote: “There are no natural differences between the men of different centuries.”79 Since France’s humanist educated elite feared their otherness to Ancient Greece and Rome, Fontenelle’s agricultural/evolutionary discourse offered a liberating path toward decolonization. The moderns succeeded in two key ways. First, by valuing commerce, they were able to redefine the meanings of civilization and barbarism, unhooking them from the Greco-Roman understandings. Second, they reversed the slope of history, thus unchaining France from its moorings in the Ancient past. In this way, the concept of progress was conceivable. However, the moderns never fully cut the strings since their underlying logic for decolonization from the Ancient World was linked to their colonization of the New World. France’s pursuit of greatness and independence became dependent upon

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repeating an old colonial drama of its former master. It sought to become a New Rome by creating a New France in the same basic mold, but changing the roles. The French placed the Amerindians in the position of the colonized object that the Gauls/French had once occupied. The nation claimed for itself the dominant role of the colonizer in which its cultural authority would radiate worldwide like the rays of the sun. Elite France simply reversed the power dynamic to become like their old masters. The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi described the colonial bind where “the colonized always considers the colonizer as a model or as an antithesis.”80 It would seem that early modern France was still caught in this binary opposition. This early modern dynamic set the mold for the nation’s colonial endeavors in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both eras, France trumpeted its ties to the Ancient World as a justification for extending itself beyond its seas.

conclusion

The Legacy of the Quarrel The Colonial Fracture

Frequently, certain actions in human life appear quite literally invraisemblable, even though they are true. —Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833)

The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns has never been fully resolved. Its most fundamental tension continues to be replayed in some of the most recent debates over the writing of French history. In this concluding chapter, I briefly examine these debates in the light of the new paradigm I have offered in this book. To begin to examine the Quarrel’s legacy, I return to a question that I raised in the introductory chapter. There, I observed that the scholarship on early modern France’s assimilation of New World sauvages was hardly new. More than a century ago, historians had unearthed a trove of archival materials documenting France’s colonial contact with the New World. In more recent decades, Atlantic World historians have produced an impressive body of research devoted to early modern France’s colonial endeavors. And yet this historical research has made only a small dent in the nation’s self-understanding. As Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal have observed, the knowledge of the nation’s colonial “presence” in the New World is “almost totally absent from [France’s] primary and secondary schools and little studied at the University level.” More broadly, this colonial history is barely known outside the school system and only enters the collective memory “through fleeting and evanescent images.”1 Most scholars of France still view colonization of the 221

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New World largely as beyond France’s own cultural identity, which is enclosed within an insular, self-protective bubble. How, then, are we to understand this resistance to including colonization as central to early modern France’s own story about its culture and history? This resistance figures centrally in a new series of so-called memory wars that broke out over the writing of French history and culture that excluded colonization from the nation’s past. Pierre’s Nora monumental seven-volume history of France, Les lieux de mémoire, published between 1984 and 1992, was a key nodal point in this controversy.2 Many reviewers hailed it as a radical reconstruction of the nation’s past, representing a true revolution in French thought. But it came under fire from other scholars because of its glaring omissions. Neither Algeria nor colonization appeared as a “site of memory” for the French nation, with one problematic exception.3 Numerous historians in France such as Suzanne Citron have criticized Nora’s Lieux de mémoire for reaffirming the nation’s traditional cultural narrative while appearing to do something new.4 Similarly, historians Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire have found Nora’s selected sites of memory troubling for their exclusion of colonization.5 These scholars have called this exclusion a “colonial fracture.” This fracture refers to the dominant national narrative that has split off France’s colonial activities from the construction of its own past, as if the two operated in two entirely separate, impermeable domains. The nation’s dominant narrative about its own cultural history assumes that colonization belongs to the culture and history of the colonized, but not to France as the colonizer. Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire have used the term “colonial fracture” to refer also to a more recent and disturbing distortion of French history.6 On 23 February 2005, Parliament subjected the writing of the nation’s history to French law. The legislature ruled that “university research programs give the history of France’s presence in overseas territories, especially in North Africa, the place that it deserves.”7 According to this law, that place should be a positive one. Article 4 ruled: “School programs should recognize in particular the positive role of France’s overseas presence, especially in North Africa.”8 Schools at all levels were forced to present this part of French history in a positive light. “Positive” was the key word which ignited a storm of protest. Objecting to this new law, many historians banded together and circulated a petition to repeal this legislation. They entitled their petition “We are the indigenes of the Republic.”9 They condemned the state’s effort to impose an “official history” on intellectual activity, research, and the teaching of

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France’s youth. This official history “imposes an official lie upon crimes, massacres, and even genocide, as well as upon slavery and the racism inherited from this past,” the petition claimed.10 The controversy was so intense that President Jacques Chirac was forced to retract article 4. Parliament adopted a significantly modified version of the law on 15 February 2006. Nevertheless, the initial tensions deepened, stimulating an immediate outpouring of new books and conferences about France’s relation to its colonial endeavors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11 According to Blanchard, many politicians and public intellectuals in France still glorify colonial France, motivated by a sense of nostalgia about the grandeur of this aspect of the nation’s past. The 2006 law glorified the nation’s colonial past by framing France’s presence in North Africa as a civilizing mission. This glorification was evident in an earlier version of this bill proposed in March 2004 which read: “During her presence in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia as well as in territories previously placed under French sovereignty, French contributions in scientific, technical, administrative, cultural and also linguistic domains were numerous. Thanks [to the French], these countries were able to develop both socially and economically; they thus contributed substantially to the spreading or influence [rayonnement] of France worldwide. To recognize the positive work of our compatriots in these territories is a duty for the French State.”12 This civilizing mission narrative sought to obscure the fact that France’s presence in North Africa was also a negative, destructive colonizing mission. This new law, in all of its versions, reiterates the master narrative of the Third Republic (1870−1945), as several historians have noted.13 However, I have traced the deeper roots of that narrative. The Third Republic’s narrative of a civilizing mission echoed that of the early modern colonial discourse which we have been examining. The leading ideologues of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry, Léon Gambetta, and Jean Jaures, presented colonization as a “love story,” as if the French were inducing a “voluntary subjection” in the colonized. For example, Jaures wrote: “When we take possession of a country, . . . wherever France is established, one loves it; wherever France is absent, one misses her; everywhere her light shines, she is beneficent; there where she no longer shines, she leaves behind her a long and sweet twilight to which hearts and longings remain attached.”14 In this narrative, the Africans and Asians replaced the American Indians of the seventeenth century; but in both versions, the colonized supposedly begged the French to come into their countries to serve as models of imitation because they loved everything

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associated with “Sweet France.” Both narratives framed the nation’s colonizing mission as a civilizing mission, as if the colonized had the same interests as those of France itself. The same basic narrative persisted through much of the twentieth century. The nation’s textbooks linked the sauvages of North Africa back to the Gauls. All of these sauvages were embarked on the same basic journey to civilization. A 1948 history textbook for French school children highlights the same basic narrative: “In Gaul, the Romans did for the French what the French did for their colonies in Algeria and Tonkin, and now in Morocco. They built nice paved roads to allow soldiers and merchants to circulate. . . . They built cities like those of Nîmes and Lyon. What a difference between the miserable village of the Gauls and these cities. . . . The Gauls learned Latin, the origin of the French language you now speak. They were no longer an independent nation, but found themselves happier than before. It is said that the Romans brought civilization to Gaul.”15 The French provided the Africans and Asians with models to imitate in order to progress from their primitive state of savagery and reach civilization. As torchbearers like the Romans, the French liberated them from their ignorance, ridding them of their primitive beliefs, habits and customs. These narratives split the nation’s civilizing mission off from its colonizing mission. Scholars of modern France have pointedly raised the question of how to understand the resistance to integrating colonization into its national narrative. They explain it by reaching back to its roots in the Third Republic, rightly arguing that the resistance comes from the need to protect the republican tradition from the implications of a colonizing mission.16 To claim that France is the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity is very difficult when the nation has colonized and subjugated other peoples. This contradiction made it necessary to keep France’s colonial history far from home. In this book I have reached further back to provide a wider and more deeply rooted framework for understanding the colonial fracture of the nation’s recent debates. These debates are illuminated by the two colonial stories that this book has presented, both of which have been marked by similar versions of a colonial fracture. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns inaugurated a first and foundational colonial fracture in the writing of French cultural and literary history during the sixteenth century. But here the French were not colonizers, but were on the opposite side of the divide, figures haunted by the memory of their nation’s own colonized past. The Quarrel’s founding battle was a memory war about how to characterize the

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Roman presence in Gaul/France. The winning narrative split off the nation’s own colonized past from the writing about its own history. This narrative saw the Roman presence in Gaul as positive, framing it as a cultural story that was isolated from its colonial context. By contrast, the moderns in the Quarrel framed the Roman presence in Gaul as negative, as part of colonial story that saw the Romans as an imperial “them” bent on subjugating the nation’s ancestors. It is not surprising that the moderns lost this memory war because they could not occupy a stable position of resistance against their former colonizers. The moderns were caught in a confused love-hate relationship with the Romans. In theorizing the dilemma for the colonized, Tunisian writer Albert Memmi characterized it as a confused double vision in which the colonized “participates in two psychical and cultural realms. . . . those of the colonizer and the colonized. The two worlds are symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues that are in conflict.”17 Memmi’s observation certainly applies to the case of the moderns in the Quarrel who were split between conflicting visions of themselves. On the one hand, the moderns venerated the Ancients for having reached the peak of civilization. Because Latin was the language of power, the moderns identified with its greatness and saw themselves through that lens. But on the other hand, the moderns also resented these imperial giants, and longed to develop their own language and world of letters to create an independent psychical and cultural realm. They wanted to see themselves through their own eyes. Because their self-understanding was entangled in both languages and worlds, the moderns vacillated between an alliance with the Romans and against them, bound to the very figures they hated, and yet wanted to become them. Elite France’s identity—its dignity and pride—became vested in maintaining a split between the Romans as colonizers and as civilizers. This split was necessary to protect the nation’s honor and to safeguard the activity of imitation. If the elite recalled that their models were their former colonizers, then imitating their modes of thought and expression would be fraught with danger. The elite thus needed to bury the memory of their colonial dynamic under the more acceptable narrative of a civilizing process. Once the nation’s own cultural story was decoupled from its colonized past, the traces of a memory war faded because that war itself would have undermined the force of the ancients’ winning narrative. However, the fading legacy of the nation’s colonized past shaped the French Academy’s agenda in the seventeenth century, which deepened the

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divide between France’s cultural and colonial stories. The Academy was founded, in part, to liberate France from its imprisonment in Greek and Roman rhetoric, which had slanderously painted the Gauls as “the most terrible and merciless of all Barbarians, . . . as Monsters who were born only for the destruction of Cities and for the unhappiness of the human race,” according to Faret’s Projet de l’Académie.18 Because the Romans presented their lies “with the most beautiful rhetorical flourishes,” their crafty rhetoric made their falsities seem true.19 The truth of the Gauls’ greatness did not matter. The supposed facts were powerless before the overwhelming force of Roman eloquence. The French Academy thus wanted to make sure its nation had its own arsenal of writers, well skilled in eloquence, to tell France’s own story from its own perspective. However, when it engaged battalions of artists to fashion the nation’s own master narrative, France became the heirs to Greek and Roman rhetoric, not its victims. This narrative trumpeted only part of the story—the more glorious side of the nation’s relation to the Ancient World, imagining France in a similar self-confident position of dominance—and left the other side in the shadows. Of course, France did achieve a position of great political and cultural power. It defined its greatness, in part, through the creation of its own empire, reducing the New World Indians to the position of the barbarian, painting them in the same derogatory light in which the Romans had portrayed the Gauls, thus justifying France’s colonizing role. In its role as colonizer, the Academy promoted a second kind of colonial fracture. It fostered a split between culture and colonization by narrowing the lens of what could be represented, and placing colonization outside that frame. It did so by promoting a poetics of contraction. In the name of purity, the French Academy whittled down the language, composed of roughly forty thousands words, to seven or eight thousand words, according to Antoine Furetière.20 For him, this poetics of purity was really a discourse of forgetting, a covert form of censorship. Worlds of meaning would be forgotten, he warned, if thousands of words were slashed from the language. Furetiere offered the word “colonie” as the first and primary example of what would be forgotten.21 Furetière was clearly prescient, since the nation’s colonial efforts in this era never made their way into France’s dominant paradigm about its own culture. They have been largely marginalized and forgotten. The poetics of contraction made it impossible to portray anything outside the frame of France’s polite world, such as the other, or ugly truths such as colonization. By purifying language, the Academy forced it to signify

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much of its meaning indirectly through metaphor. Since the Academy had excised thirty-two thousand words, the surviving seven to eight thousand had to stand in for those that had been excluded by serving as metaphors. Metaphorization, however, leads to a greater abstraction of thought. Abstraction is a great virtue in many instances, especially in poetic language, such as Racine’s drama. But metaphors create a hazy lens that flattens differences and makes them seem similar. Given the limits placed on words, writers could not bring the other up close and into sharp focus. Fontenelle suggested that Racine’s dramatic characters were trapped within a sameness that denied them their differences: “Racine only paints the French of this current century, even when he has wanted to paint those of another century or of other nations.”22 Most seventeenth-century French novels set in the New World portrayed the Amerindians as mirrors of the French. The anonymous author of the novella Les nouvelles de l’Amérique wrote: “The people of the Americas are not of a nature different from the French.”23 Certainly this novel, and others like it, bears out this belief. Except for the relations de voyage, the other rarely comes closely into view. Classical language cannot portray otherness because the same contracted set of words must be used to describe both sameness and otherness. The dominant cultural discourse of purity, with its poetics of contraction, narrowed the frame of France’s world and created the illusion that the nation’s boundaries were fortified and impermeable, with a clear divide separating the civilized from the barbaric. And yet at the same time, the nation promoted a politics of expansion, opening up the boundaries of the nation to include the New World sauvages, encouraging their assimilation. It was no accident that these symmetrically opposite discourses emerged at the same time. The cultural discourse of contraction enabled the nation’s politics of expansion by obscuring it, and by reframing the colonial story through a smaller and more polite cultural lens. In the truncated cultural story, France, like the Gallic Hercules, possessed a dazzling eloquence that enchanted (and enchained) masses of people to follow him voluntarily and eagerly towards (French) civilization. Scholars typically uphold this famous image as the symbol of France’s great cultural power. The fact that it also refers to the nation’s colonizing ambitions has mostly escaped notice. The colonizing story has been hidden, but in plain sight. While the relations de voyage clearly told this story in the greatest detail, the French Academy relegated this genre to the margins of French culture. France’s key texts about its cultural greatness also told a version of the colonizing story but presented

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it through such abstract, polite language that it got lost in a fuzzy haze, subsumed and reframed as a story about the magical power of the nation’s culture. Although scholars have now increasingly been bringing the colonial history to the fore, it still remains hidden—hidden to the nation’s dominant cultural discourse about its self-understanding. This discourse offers it no space. To include colonization as an integral part of the nation’s cultural paradigm just does not seem vraisemblable, or true-seeming, given the sedimented layers of the nation’s official discourse which suggest the contrary. The French Academy, understanding the power of rhetoric to make the false seem true, and vice versa, enshrined la vraisemblance as one of the most important criteria for judging the power of a literary text. When the Academy condemned Le Cid, its members wrote in their published criticism of the play, Les sentiments sur le Cid: “There are monstruous truths that are necessary to suppress for the good of society, or if one can’t keep them hidden, one should stigmatize them as strange.” It was in this context that the Academy then insisted on the importance of la vraisemblance. “It is principally on these occasions that the Poet should prefer the True-seeming to the true and that one must work to find a good lie, provided that it seems reasonable.”24 The role of art and of the nation’s cultural discourse, then, is to “correct” for monstrous truths. A monstrous truth, such as colonization, can be made to seem false, if it does not find support in the dominant underlying cultural discourse. Gérard Genette has observed that the principle of la vraisemblance is what we would today call an ideology.25 It provides a commonly accepted set of unspoken assumptions, beliefs and prejudices, a system of values about the human. An erroneous story can seem true if it resonates with a community’s most fundamental beliefs and values. Reciprocally, a true story may not seem true if it is too far outside the dominant frame of understanding. In recent decades, scholars of both the early modern era and the modern era have uncovered much compelling evidence about colonization. However, this research is often deprived of the full force it should have because it has to fight against the power of France’s myth-making machinery that has placed colonization outside of the nation’s frame of self-understanding. For the early modern era, the eloquence of the nation’s “artisans of glory” was so successful in promoting their version of France that even now, centuries later, it seems invraisemblable that the nation ever had a colonial past that mattered for its own history and culture, either in its role as the colonized or the colonizer. Because colonization has been largely hidden to early modern France’s cultural paradigm about itself, my goal has been to reconfigure that paradigm to

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accommodate it. That the colonial and cultural stories were interdependent, each supporting the other, was both true-seeming and also true. In presenting the foundational sources of the split between culture and colonization in the early modern era, I hope that the research about the nation’s colonial endeavors will find a wider and more stable home in the colonizer’s own cultural narrative and thus help suture the colonial fracture.

notes

introduction 1. Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheke, vol. 3, bk. 5, 31.5–32.4. 2. Ibid., 26.1–27. 3. Ibid., 33.3−33. 4. Hellenistic Greece extended far beyond Greece proper, to those parts of the world that Alexander the Great conquered, where the impact of Greek culture made itself felt. The Hellenistic Greeks were the writers of the Hellenistic period following Alexander’s death in 323 b.c. who in spite of Roman rule continued to write in Greek. Strabo (b. 64/3 b.c.) was an Asiatic Greek geographer and historian who wrote in Greek but was a Roman citizen. Diodorus (90–30 b.c.) was a Greek from Sicily who settled and wrote in Rome. 5. Strabo, Geography, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917−33), 4.4−5. 6. Ibid., 4.4.5. 7. Cicero, “Pro Fonteio,” 31. 8. Diodorus, Bibliotheke, 30.2–31. 9. Livy, History of Rome, 10.28. 10. Diodorus, Bibliotheke, 31.1. 11. Ibid., 32.4–7. This edition’s editor commented, “The Greek may possibly mean ‘with concubines of both sexes’ but Athenaeus (13.603A) states that the Celts were accustomed to sleep with two boys.” 12. See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back, which argues for the importance of linking the concept of the postcolonial to an antecedent colonial event. 13. Citton, Lire, interpréter, actualiser. 14. See Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages. See also Gaunt, “Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” 15. Geary, Before France and Germany, 78–79. 16. Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History, 35–36. Many French historians did know of the Gauls prior to this moment; however, they did not accord them much importance, because they were not seen as ancestors. See Gadoffre, La révolution culturelle dans la France

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des humanistes, 319–45. See also Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au XVIe siècle, and Beaune, Naissance de la nation France for a discussion of this history. 17. Yates, Astraea, 121–22. 18. For a discussion of this Roman founding legend, see Waswo, “The History That Literature Makes.” Waswo analyzed how the Romans constructed a mythic Trojan origin to posit an independent birth from the Greeks. Moreover, he studied this myth as a narrative about exile, migration, and displacement. For another study of mythic origins, see Brague, Europe, 99–130. 19. Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au XVIe siècle, 20. 20. Ibid., 28, 17. 21. Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? 79–80. 22. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the Gauls became serious candidates as alternative ancestors. The year 1485 is a convenient inaugural date because it stood out as the moment when Paul-Emile, the official historian under King Louis XII, wrote the first book entirely devoted to the history of the Gauls in his De l’Antiquité des Gaules. His history glorified the Gauls at the expense of the Romans, challenging France’s myth of Trojan descent by suggesting that the Franks were descended from the Gauls rather than the Trojans. See Beaune, Naissance de la nation France, which suggested that some French recognized the Gauls as the ancestors of the French in the late fifteenth century. Between 1450 and 1480 “les Français sont de plus en plus nombreux à connaître la Gaule et ses habitants et à s’en reconnaître les descendants. . . . En 1480, un Français a, à coup sûr, des ancêtres gaulois qu’il ne possédait pas en 1400.” Ibid., 33. Both Dubois and Gadoffre placed this moment later in the sixteenth century. But what really matters for my purposes was the moment when the question was opened up and debated, as opposed to when the Gauls became the preferred ancestors. It is safe to say that the Trojan versus the Gallic ancestry had been a serious controversy ever since the late fifteenth century and was debated throughout the sixteenth century. According to Beaune, Paul-Emile railed against “les ténèbres qui couvrent l’histoire des Gaulois qui firent de grands exploits mais n’eurent personne pour les célébrer.” Ibid., 34. Paul Emile described the Gauls’ great expansion in much of Europe— Germany, Spain, England, and Northern Italy. He championed Brennus as a Gallic hero who was, he claimed, the model of civility and military prowess. In the sixteenth century, Jean LeMaire de Belges’ Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye (1512) posited the Gauls as the ancestors of the Trojans and thus of the Franks. This seminal text made the Gauls respectable enough to qualify as candidates for France’s ancestry, painting a golden age in which the Gauls were like giants who walked the earth and made the Greeks and Romans tremble in their boots. 23. Hermann, La Renaissance, 187–88. 24. Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au XVIe siècle, 41–89. 25. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14. 26. For a study of the multiple meanings of Rome, see Tripet, Ecrivez-moi de Rome. 27. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 68–70. 28. Ibid.

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29. Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis, 14–15. 30. Desan, Penser l’histoire à la renaissance, 104. 31. Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 273. 32. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 12. 33. See Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. See also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 34. Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiae, I, quoted in Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 36. 35. Cave, “Ancients and Moderns: France,” 417. 36. See Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage; Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 195–242. 37. See Deslandres, “Les missions françaises intérieures et lointaines,” 505–38. 38. For example, see d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins. 39. “D’estre admis dans la vie commune des François.” (Colbert to l’Abbé de Quéylus, 10 March 1671, in Colbert, Lettres, mémoires et instructions de Colbert, 452. 40. “Un mesme peuple et un mesme sang.” Colbert to Talon, 5 April 1666 and 5 April 1667, Rapport de l’Archiviste de la Province de Québec, 45, 72; Colbert to Laval, 7 March 1668, Rapport. 41. See Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 153–90; See also H. R. and C. H. Laverdière Casgrain, eds., Le Journal des Jésuites,312. Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy”; Bellmessous, “Etre français en NouvelleFrance”; Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’.” It is interesting that the stories of the relations between the French and the Indians have had a long literary life—witness Chateaubriand’s René and Atala. 42. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. 64 (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896–1901), 185–229 (cited as JR). All references to and translations of the Jesuit Relations will be from this edition, followed by the volume and page numbers. For an interesting discussion of this incident, see White, The Middle Ground, 72. See also Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 153–90; Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men. 43. “Ma fille lui dis-je, Dieu ne vous défend pas le mariage, et je ne vous dis pas, ‘Mariez-vous ou ne vous mariez pas’: si vous n’y consentez que pour l’amour de Dieu, et que vous croyez qu’en vous mariant, vous gagnez à Dieu votre famille, cette pensée est bonne.” JR, LXIV:205. 44. D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins; Mercure François, vol. 3, 163–80. 45. See John Rule’s preface to Stewart, Assimilation and Acculturation in SeventeenthCentury Europe. 46. Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. See also Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles; DeJean, Literary Fortifications; Stewart, Assimilation and Acculturation in Seventeenth-Century Europe. 47. Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth Century Drama and Prose.

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48. Foucault, Les mots et les choses. 49. Melzer and Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art. 50. Bellmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism,” and “Etre français en NouvelleFrance”; Greer, The People of New France; Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française; Jacquin, Indiens Blancs and Histoire des Indiens d’Amérique du nord; Jaenen, Friend and Foe; White, The Middle Ground. 51. See Geertz, Local Knowledge. 52. An increasing number of scholars are now exploring the nature of the cultural contact between France and the New World. This kind of investigation, however, is different from examining how France’s colonization of the New World shaped the development of its internal dynamics. For an exploration of the cultural contact, see Dobie, Trading Places; Garraway, The Libertine Colony; Reiss, Against Autonomy. 53. Todorov, The Conquest of America; Todorov, On Human Diversity; Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire; Carey and Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment. 54. Marshall, The French Atlantic. 55. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music. 56. See Brazeau, Writing a New France. 57. White, The Middle Ground. He focused on how both colonizer and colonized forged a “middle ground.” See Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism”; Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française; Aubert, “‘The Blood of France’.” Bellmessous and Aubert explore the links between this New World colonial policy and the concepts of blood and “race” in France. See also Warkentin and Podruchny, eds., Decentering the Renaissance; Kamps and Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge. 58. Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism,” “Etre Français en Nouvelle-France”; Aubert, “The Blood of France.” 59. Suleiman and McDonald, eds., French Global. Miller, French Atlantic Triangle. 60. Frank Lestringuant has demonstrated the importance of sixteenth-century writers such as André Thevet and Jean de Léry, as well as Montaigne’s essays on cannibals. However, Thevet and Léry are not canonical. Montaigne’s essays constitute the most notable exception. 61. Anthony Pagden and Anthony Grafton were pioneers in this area of research, focusing primarily on Spain and England, respectively, although they do consider all European colonizers on a general level. See Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man; Pagden, European Encounters with the New World; Pagden, Lords of All the World. See Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 2–3. In Bernand and Gruzinski, Histoire du Nouveau monde: Les métissages, the authors have an important section on the history of French colonization of the New World, although their primary focus is on Spain. They do not link this history to French literature, however. Gilbert Chinard’s pioneering work unearthed a key corpus of literary texts about the New World but did not connect his discussion to the history. See Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique; Todorov, The Conquest of America, is focused primarily on Spain. Walter D. Mignolo, a cultural historian of Spanish/Latin American/American studies and author

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of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, discusses the rebirth of the classical tradition in Spain as a justification for colonial expansion. Roland Greene, in his Unrequited Conquests, has explored how Petrarchism, the convention of writing about unrequited love, is one of the original colonial discourses. 62. Peter Burke also briefly explored the question of impact, observing that the “discovery” of the Americas encouraged European scholars to develop new interpretations of the history of the world. See Burke, “America and the Rewriting of World History.” 63. See Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, introductory chapter. Grafton also understands the impact of the New World as part of a larger conflict between the ancients and moderns. However, he views this conflict in more scientific and philosophical terms. He writes: “In 1492, all educated Europeans knew where powerful knowledge lay. It was contained in authoritative texts: the Bible, the philosophical, historical and literary works of the Greeks and Romans; and a few modern works of unusually high authority. These books described the universe. . . . The men who understood these concepts were creatures of the book, trained in the latinate seclusion of schools and universities. The mental world was bounded by the knowledge contained on their library shelves. . . . By the early seventeenth century, knowledge had burst the bounds of the library. It now seemed as large and varied as the world itself. Galileo, Bacon and Descartes agreed that practical men and keen observers were often more reliable, because less prejudiced, than books and book-trained scholars.” Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 2–3. The impact of the New World lay in how it intersected with the new science and challenged the author’s role as source of knowledge. The whole conception of the book and its epistemological status was changing. 64. See Wintroub, A Sauvage Mirror, which discusses several versions of this basic narrative. 65. Pagden, Lords of All the World, 4. Anthony Grafton also read the New World in relation to the Ancient World. My work is greatly indebted to that of Pagden and Grafton, both of whom have stimulated me to think outside of a simple France–New World axis to include the Ancient World. 66. This term emerged in the eighteenth century and referred to the general process of rendering one thing similar to another. Its more specific, colonial usage appeared in the nineteenth century. The 1836 Littré Dictionary defined it as “To convert and make similar, civilization tends to assimilate different people.” 67. The term “romanization” is equally problematic to describe Roman imperialism, as Greg Woolf has argued in Becoming Roman. This term erroneously suggests that a pure, fixed Roman culture existed prior to the integration of outside groups. Moreover, it inaccurately conveys that the assimilation of these groups resulted in a cultural or imperial uniformity. And yet Wolfe uses the term because “it is a convenient short-hand for a series of cultural changes” for which no other term exists. Ibid., 7. 68. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. 69. Quoted in ibid., 1. 70. Ranum, Artisans of Glory. 71. Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste?

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72. Ibid., 74–77. 73. Dompnier, in Le vénin de l’hérésie,made a similar argument about the church during the Catholic Reformation. He observed that the Catholic Church should have had every reason to feel self-confident after the Edict of Nantes in 1598, since it was at the height of its power, dominating in multiple ways. And yet it was seized by paranoia, unsure of its hold over the predominantly Catholic nation. The “objective reality” did not correspond to how many key church figures subjectively experienced it.

chapter 1. the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns as a colonial battle 1. See DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns; Nelson, “The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns”; Highet, The Classical Tradition. 2. Boileau, Mémoires, cited in DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns, 44. 3. Nelson, “The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns”; Highet, The Classical Tradition. 4. Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France. 5. Fumaroli, “Les Abeilles et les araignéés,” in La querelle des anciens et des modernes, ed. Anne-Marie Lecoq. 6. DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns. 7. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 8. Cave, “Ancients and Moderns: France,” 417. 9. Several literary scholars have sensed that the stated explanations are inadeqate and thus sought to uncover the Quarrel’s unstated issues. See DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns; Merlin-Kajman, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle, 239–77; Merlin-Kajman, L’excentricité académique, 169–88. Both scholars have convincingly explained the underlying issues by shifting the ground away from imitation itself toward the notion of a “public.” In this connection, see Habermas, L’espace public. Other important studies on the Quarrel include Jeffries, Mapping Discord; Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of SeventeenthCentury France. My goal is to explain the issues within the framework of imitation itself 10. Pagden, Lords of All the World, 4. Anthony Grafton also read the New World in relation to the Ancient World. My work is greatly indebted to that of Pagden and Grafton, both of whom have stimulated me to think outside a simple France–New World axis to include the Ancient World. 11. See Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation, 19. 12. Cited in Cohen, “In Search of the Trojan Origins of French,” 66. Henri Estienne has observed “how closely the French language resembles Greek, not only in the great number of words . . . but also in the many beautiful ways of speaking. . . . Greek . . . is a close neighbor [to our own].” Henri Estienne, Traicte de la conformité du langage Français avec le Grec. 13. See Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts; and Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 89–99.

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14. The Gauls could be broken up according to the geographic territories they occupied, which covered what are now France, northern Italy, Belgium, western Switzerland, and those parts of the Netherlands and Germany west of the Rhine. 15. Ever since Diodorus, many historians have used the terms “Gauls” and “Celts” interchangeably. Diodorus wrote: “And now it may be useful to draw a distinction. The peoples who dwell in the interior above Massalia, those on the slopes of the Alps, and those on this side of the Pyrenees Mountains are called Celts, whereas the people who are established above this land of Celtica in the parts which stretch to the north, both along the ocean and along the Hercynian Mountains, and all the peoples who come after these, as far as Scythia, are known as Gauls; the Romans however include all these nations together under a single name, calling them one and all Gauls.” Diodorus, Bibliotheke, 31.5–32. Similarly, Etienne Pasquier noted that many French writers spoke of Gauls and Celts interchangeably. See Etienne Pasquier, Les recherches de la France, 1: 266. 16. Joan DeJean has rightly argued in Ancients against Moderns that in the proposed educational reform, the ancients won out against the moderns. I further develop this notion in chapter 6. See also Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 17. Elias, The Civilizing Process. 18. Suzanne Citron’s important historical work includes this silenced part of French history. See Citron, L’école bloquée; “De la cohérence historiographique au bric à brac”; Enseigner l’histoire aujourd’hui; Le mythe national; L’histoire de France, autrement; and Citron, Guyonvarc’h, and Plasseraud, Histoire de France. See also Kruta, Les Celtes. 19. It is possible to conceptualize this phenomenon by invoking a recently coined phrase, “covering.” Based on Erving Goffman’s work, Kenji Yoshino articulated this concept to designate a phenomenon where intellectually we might know something to be true, but emotionally we do not really feel it or see it because its impact is muted or “covered” over. See Yoshino, Covering. 20. Beaune, Naissance de la nation France; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation. 21. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 116–17. 22. Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation, 40–56. 23. Beaune, Naissance de la nation, 37. 24. “Les Gaulois, impatients de la servitude romaine, émigrèrent au delà du Rhin chez les anciennes colonies qu’ils y avaient fondées et sitôt qu’ils le purent ils s’empressèrent de secouer le joug romain, de revenir dans leur patrie, et d’y prendre le nom des Francs, c’està-dire d’hommes libres.” Bodin, La méthode de l’histoire, 353. 25. “Soumission paravant faite aux Romains,” “Vindiquer et retraire en leur ancienne franchise et liberté naturelle, hors de la contrainte soumission, paravant faite aux Romains. En laquelle liberté par eulx recouvertes, ilz ont jusques a huy perseveré, et au vouloir de Dieu perseveront à jamais.” Cited in Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au XVIe siècle, 43. 26. “Je démontrerai que les Gauloys ont conquis et subjugué, non seulement Rome en Italie, mais aussi toute l’Europe et grande partie de l’Asie . . . que les letters et sciences ont eu origine en Gaule, et comme les Gauloys, en leurs pais de Gaule, ont esté et sont encore,

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plus excellents que nuls autres.” Cited in Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, 109. 27. “Les Latins ont appris à parler des François, plustôt que les François d’eux.” Cited in ibid. 28. Cited in Bouwsma, Concordia Mundi, 261. 29. “La Grammaire et toutes aultres disciplines liberalles estoyent anciennement en langaige Gaulloys es escolles de nos Druides sans en rien tenir ny des Grecs, ny des Latins: et depuis estants sorties de la Gaulle avec leurs Gaulloys sont passees en la Grece, ou elles ont este fort cheries et honnorees, et de la ont este invitees en Italie, et en toutes les parties du monde.” Cited in Cohen, “In Search of the Trojan Origins of French,” 73. 30. Wine, Forgotten Virgo. 31. I owe this line of argumentation to Michael Randall’s comments on my chapter. 32. “Avant qu’elle fust assujettie, & reduite en forme de Province par les Romains.” “Sujette à la domination & autorité d’un seul.” Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 1, 2. 33. “De l’estat de la Gaule, depuis qu’elle fut reduite en forme de province par les Romains.” “Gemit fous le faix de servitude.” “Sucçoyent leur sang.” Ibid., 27, 23. 34. “N’usoyent plus de leur police, ny de leurs loix ancienes & accouftumees, ains falloit qu’elles obeiffent aux magiftrats & gouuerneurs, qui leur estoient envoyez auec plein pouuoir, & souueraine authorité, d’administrer justice & alloyent accompagnez de leurs sergens, qui portoyēt deuant eux les faifceaux de verges, & les haches, comme deuant des Lieutenans du peuple Romain.” “Affranchirent de la tyrannie des Romains, . . . la Gaule.” Ibid., 28–29. 35. “Nous appelons franc celuy qui eft libre & exempt de toute seruitude . . . & pour dire, mettre en liberté, nous disons Affranchir.” Ibid., 47. 36. “Affranchirent de la tyrannie des Romains, . . . la Gaule.” Ibid., 50. 37. “Evanger nostre France contre l’injure des ans.” Pasquier, Les lettres d’Estienne Pasquier, vol. 2, bk. C, vi. 38. Italy’s cultural domination was particularly threatening, given that Italy held a special claim to being the Roman Empire’s most legitimate heir. Pasquier resented the Italians for accusing the French of barbarism. “Je ne puis quelquefois, qu’à juste occasion je ne me rie de la pluspart de nos modernes Italiens, lesquels se pensent avantager grandement en réputation envers toutes autres contrées, lors que faisans mention des guerres que nous avons eues contr’eux, il nous appellent Barbares.” Ibid., 258–59. 39. Pasquier complained that Petro Crinit “lors qu’il met le nom des Gaulois en avant, si d’une mesme suite il ne l’accompagnoit d’un surnom, ou de lourdaut, ou de Barbare.” Ibid. 40. Cited in Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 288–89. 41. “Une servitude estrangère.” Pasquier, Les lettres, vol. 2, 275. 42. “Superstitieuse servitude dont nous captivons nos esprits à la suite de droict ancien.” Cited in Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, 121. 43. “Cette premiere liberté que Cesar luy avoit emblé.” Pasquier, Les recherches de la France, vol. 1, 273–74.

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44. “L’honneur de nos bons vieux pères est demeuré enseveli dedans le tombeau d’oubliance.” Ibid., 256. 45. “Transmettre à la postérité aucune chose de nos vaillances?” Ibid., 256. 46. “Nous n’en avons presque connoissance que par emprunt.” Ibid., 254. 47. “Perpetuel ennemy du nom Gaulois.” Ibid., 271. 48. For a fuller discussion of this “new history,” see Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History, 28–71. The proponents of the new history also sought to understand the proper subject of history. They were reacting against the belief that “no history mattered since the fall of Rome,” since, as Plutarch had asked, “What else then is all history, if not the praise of Rome?” Cited in Huppert, 15. If the new history focused on France’s own story, it also sought to incorporate it in a larger universal history about the progress of humanity from savagery to civilization; it would include the history of all peoples, including the Americans, Africans, Arabs, and Turks. 49. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice and Interviews, 151. See also History of Sexuality. 50. To highlight their ignorance, Pasquier criticized the Greek historian Euphore, who mistakenly grouped together different peoples under the category “Gaul,” including nonGauls, which accounts for why Euphore had such a bad opinion of them. “The Gauls had many victories and planted their name in many places. They had many victories in Germany, Scythia, Spain, Great Britain, Italy, Greece and Bithynia.” Pasquier, Les recherches de la France, vol. I, 267. 51. “Les historiographes latins [sought to] obscurcir quelque peu la louange qu’ils ne nous pouvoient bonnement desrober . . . les Gaulois [étoient] allechez de la douceur des vins d’Italie.” Ibid., 268. 52. “J’ay observé le lisant, je ne trouve que ce mot de Barbare lui soit échappé de la plume à l’endroit de nous, hormis en deux lieux.” Ibid. 53. “Les calomnies de quelques Autheurs qui . . . voulurent obscurcir nos victoires.” Ibid., 266. 54. “Car s’estant l’authorité de quelques Autheurs Latins par longue trainée de temps insinuée entre nous, ou pour mieux dire, affinée, tellement qu’ils sont reputez veritables, il est fort mal-aisé de déraciner cette opinion du commun, que par un mesme moyen l’on ne passe les bornes d’un simple narrateur. En quoy l’on ne sçauroit mieux convaincre tels Auteurs, que parce que nous apprenons d’eux-mesmes. D’autant que voulans quelques fois dénigrer nos victoires pour donner lustre aux leurs, ils ne s’avisent pas qu’ils se contredisent, c’est a dire, qu’ils veulent donner à entendre d’un à nostre desadvantage: et neanmoins qui confrontera leurs longs propos piece à piece, il trouvera qu’ils montrent tout le contraire.” Ibid., 272. 55. “Cette legereté improperée aux Gaulois, ne luy provenoit point tant d’un cerveau mal arresté, que pour recouvrer cette premiere liberté que Cesar luy avoit emblé: reputant à liberté, ou de n’estre sous une servitude estrangère.” Ibid., 273. 56. Caesar had observed that “in the schools of the Druids, [the young men] learn by heart a great number of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under

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training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons—that they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing, and so neglect the cultivation of memory; and in fact, it does usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the student and the action of the memory.” Caesar, Gallic Wars, 14. 57. “Les Druydes furent si avaricieux de rediger aucune chose par escrit”; “les Druydes . . . si jalous du bien de la posterité que les autres: reduisirent veritablement les faits et gestes de nos Roys par mémoires.” Pasquier, Les recherches de la France, vol. 1, 254–56. 58. “Bien faire, et de ne rien escrire.” Ibid., 256. 59. “L’ignorance de notz majeurs,” “en plus grand recommendation le bien faire que le bien dire.” Joachim Du Bellay, La Défense et illustration de la langue française, ed. Helgerson, I.iii.327. All the references to and most of the translations come from this edition. 60. “Pratique de lecture & d’écriture. Longtemps avant que Jules César vint en France, les Philosophes nommés Druides . . . enseignaient tous ceux qui s’y rendaient en leur faisant apprendre par coeur d’innombrables milliers de vers. Je ne puis bonnement ici dire avec certitude en quelle sorte de lettres ils enseignaient: si c’était en caractères Hébraïques, Grecs, Latins ou Français.” Geoffroy Tory, Champ Fleury, Livre I, the verso of leaf numbered FEVIL VI. 61. “Furent abolyes par Jules Cesar. Car luy et les Romains estoient si gormans et grands ambrasseurs de gloire.” Ibid. 62. “En détruisant lois, coutumes, usages et toutes autres bonnes choses, en démolissant épitaphes et sépulcres.” Ibid. 63. “Ils voulaient que leurs victoires et arrogances fussent mises en mémoire par leurs lettres Latines.” Ibid. 64. “Rendre toutes autres nations viles et abjectes aupres d’eux . . . certaine conjuration conspirant contre nous . . . si mal recueilliz, que nous en avons quasi perdu non seulement la gloyre, mais la memoyre.” Du Bellay, La Défense, I.ii.325−27. 65. “Pour nous rendre encor’ plus odieux et contemptibles, nous ont appellez brutaux, cruelz et barbares.” Ibid., 327. 66. “Les Romains nous ont appellez barbares, veu leur ambition et insatiable faim de gloyre.” Ibid., 325. 67. “Cete Grece menteresse.” Ibid., II. Conclusion. 413. 68. “Le Romain Charlatan.” See Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes, 125–30. 69. For this “politique de la mémoire,” see Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale, 9–30; Bancel and Blanchard, “Les pièges de la mémoire coloniale.” The memory politics of present-day France refer to the fact that the official French history has refused to include its colonial past as part of its national memory. See my concluding chapter for further discussion of this connection. 70. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 26–33.

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71. Ibid., 49. See also Balsdon and Dacre, Romans and Aliens; Laurence and Berry, eds., Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire. 72. Greg Woolf translates humanitas as “civilization,” but the term contains shades of related concepts, such as education, development, modernity, culture. The corresponding Greek words would be philanthropia and paideia. 73. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 57. See also Pagden, Lords of All the World. 74. Pliny, Natural History, bk. 3, iv. 75. “Les Romains qui ont eu domination sur la plus grande partie du monde, ont plus prosperé et plus obtenu de victoires par leur langage que par leur lance.” Tory, Champ Fleury, f. v. 76. Strabo, Geography, 4.4.2–3. 77. Ibid., 4.4.1–2. 78. Caesar, Gallic Wars, bk. VII, 411. 79. Strabo, Geography, 3.2.14–15. 80. Ibid., 4.1.5. 81. Ibid., 4.1.11–12. 82. Rankin, Celts and the Classical World. 83. Strabo, Geography, 3.2.14–15. 84. Ibid., 4.1.5. 85. Cicero, Letters to His Friends, 28–30. 86. Ibid. 87. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 7. 88. “Les vaincus en ennemis, selon la coutume des autres conquérants, en les exterminant, en les dépouillant, en les réduisant en servitude, ou en les forçant, par la dureté du joug qu’on leur impose, de hair le nouveau gouvernement.” Rollin, Discours préliminaire au traité des études, 318. 89. “Les regarda tous comme ses sujets naturels, les fit habiter avec lui dans Rome, leur communiqua tous les privilèges des anciens citoyens, adopta leurs fêtes et leurs sacrifices, leur ouvrit indifféremment l’entrée à tous les emplois civils et militaires; et, en les intéressant par tous ces avantages au bien de l’Etat, il les y attacha par des liens si puissants et volontaires, qu’ils ne furent jamais tentés de les rompre.” Ibid. 90. “Les traitent tous comme . . . ses enfants.” Ibid. 91. “Plaidait leur cause dans le sénat, qui défendait leurs droits et leurs intérêts.” Ibid. 92. “Tous les droits” and “admis au gouvernement de l’Etat. . . . Les Gaules étaient pleines de familles consulaires,” and they fulfilled “les charges civiles et militaires.” Ibid., 318–19. This strategy was distinctive of Ancient Rome, and Rollin criticized the Greeks for having done the opposite. Pericles’ key mistake was that “on ne tiendrait pour Athéniens naturels et véritables que ceux qui seraient nés de père et de mère athéniens. Par ce seul décret, qui excluait plus du quart des ses citoyens, il affaiblit extrêmement sa république.” Ibid. Unlike the Romans, he did not seek “unir [les vaincus] à soi comme membres du corps de l’Etat et comme partie de sa république.” Ibid. Pericles’ ignorance or disdain of this principle was what ruined Greece, according to Rollin.

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93. “Sans qu’il y eut presque de différence entre eux et les vainqueurs.” Ibid. Rollin presented the process as if it were unidirectional, as he barely described what the Romans borrowed from the Gauls. 94. “Le talent de la parole. . . . Je mets cette qualité parmi les vertus guerrieres,” since eloquence was “l’art et l’habilité de gagner les esprits.” Rome sought “associ[er] [les Gauls] à sa puissance, à ses avantages et à sa gloire, elle formait un Etat toujours florissant.” Ibid. 95. “Oubli[t] sa qualité de vainqueur . . . on n’a point vu d’affranchi qui n’ait préféré cette nouvelle patrie à son pays natal et à sa famille.” Ibid., 318. 96. Ibid. 97. “Etaient nés et sortis de la terre.” Ibid. 98. See Rankin, Celts and the Classical World, 139. 99. French historian Pierre Miquel described this transitional moment: “L’assimilation des vaincus se fait sans heurts, pacifiquement, progressivement. . . . Ainsi [les Gaulois] acceptaient-ils la romanisation: leurs magistrats municipaux recevaient souvent le titre de citoyens romains. . . . Les nouveaux Romains de Gaule étaient essentiellement des Gaulois ‘naturalisés’ romains . . . cette procédure d’assimilation ne s’exerçait qu’au profit de l’élite.” Miquel, Histoire de la France, 32. 100. Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 20.

chapter 2. the return of the submerged story about france’s colonized past in the quarrel over imitation 1. De Certeau, The Writing of History, 4. 2. For a broader discussion of the defense as a genre, see Ferguson, Trials of Desire. 3. See Rickard, The French Language in the Seventeenth Century; Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? 4. Trudeau, Les inventeurs du bon usage. 5. Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 1–17; 185–93. 6. Scholars often debate the distance or proximity between the imitative arts and their objects of representation, or the reader/viewer’s role in mimetic theory. See Lyons and Nichols, eds. From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. 7. Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste?; Fumaroli, Trois institutions littéraires. 8. “La barbarie [qui] se glissait parmi vos sujets.” Savaron, Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement, 5. 9. “Rien tant que les lettres ne peut recommander les rois ni réfréner les courages des Français, et les contenir en leur devoir: occasion que pour tenir en bride la nature âpre et féroce de nos anciens Celtes, on institua des lieux publics pour l’exercice des lettres, et l’Hercule Gaulois a surmonté les courages des Gaulois, d’ailleurs invincibles, les a attirés à lui par des chaînons de paroles dorées.” Ibid. My emphasis. The French Academy’s 1694 dictionary defined “courage” as “la disposition de l’âme” or “passion” or “sentiment.” 10. “Tenir en bride la nature âpre et féroce de nos anciens Celtes.” Savaron, Traité que

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les lettres sont l’ornement, 5. The term “Celts” (“Celtes”) here is used as synonymous with “Gauls.” 11. “Cette ferocité innée aux esprits des Français [qui] ne fut atrempée de la douceur des lettres.” Ibid. 12. Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 185–93. 13. “Pratique de lecture & d’écriture . . . [l]ongtemps avant que Jules César vint en France.” Tory, Champ Fleury, livre I, FEVIL IV. The notion of a memory theft also applied to other circumstances, such as Africans taken in the slave trade. 14. “En détruisant lois, coutumes, usages et toutes autres bonnes choses, en démolissant épitaphes et sépulcres.” Ibid., 6. 15. “Ils voulaient que leurs victoires et arrogances fussent mises en mémoire par leurs lettres Latines.” Ibid. 16. “A quoy a bien aydé l’envie des Romains, qui comme par une certaine conjuration conspirant contre nous, ont extenué en tout ce qu’ilz ont peu notz louanges belliques, dont ilz ne pouvoint endurer la clarté: et non seulement nous ont fait tort en cela, mais pour nous rendre encor’ plus odieux et contemptibles, nous ont appellez brutaux, cruelz et barbares.” Du Bellay, La défense et illustration de la langue française, ed. Helgerson, I.ii.327. My emphasis. All the references and most of the translations come from this edition. 17. “Les Romains nous ont appellez barbares, veu leur ambition et insatiable faim de gloyre: qui tachoient non seulement à subjuguer, mais à rendre toutes autres nations viles et abjectes aupres d’eux: principalement les Gauloys, dont ilz ont receu plus de honte et dommaige que des autres. A ce propos, songeant beaucoup de foys d’ou vient que les gestes du peuple Romain sont tant celebrés de tout le monde, voyre de si long intervale preferés à ceux de toutes les autres nations ensemble, je ne treuve point plus grande raison que ceste cy: c’est que les Romains ont eu si grande multitude d’écrivains, que la plus part de leur gestes (pour ne dire pis) par l’espace de tant d’années, ardeur de batailles, vastité d’Italie, incursions d’estrangers, s’est conservée entière jusques à nostre tens. Au contraire, les faiz des autres nations, singulièrement des Gauloys, avant qu’ilz tumbassent en la puyssance des Francoys, et les faiz des Francoys mesmes depuis qu’ilz ont donné leur nom aux Gaules, ont été si mal recueilliz, que nous en avons quasi perdu non seulement la gloyre, mais la memoyre.” Ibid., I.ii.325–27. My emphasis. 18. “De tout temps . . . se sont rendu redoutables aux plus célèbres Nations de la Terre, et leur Nom regne encore parmy quelques-unes comme un Trophée de leur victoires.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie, 18. 19. “Nostre Renommée ait quelque temps obscurcy la sienne, aussi bien que notre Valeur a triomphé de ses Peuples et de ses Provinces.” Ibid., 18. 20. “Avec toute sa hayne et tous ses artifices” sought to “estouffer cette verité [of the Gauls’ greatness] dans les déguisements de ses Histoires.” Ibid. 21. “Il semble ils [les Romains] ne n’y soient engagez que pour leur [les Gaules] dire des injures. Tantost ils les appellent les plus terribles et les plus impitoyables de tous les Barbares. Quelques fois ils les nomment des Géants énormes et farouches, et des Colosses sanglants animez par la seule fureur et la cruauté qu’ils exerçoient dans le monde, et souvent

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ils taschent de les representer comme des Monstres qui n’estoient nays que pour la désolation des Villes, et pour le malheur du Genre-humain.” Ibid. 20. 22. “Avec toutes les plus belles couleurs de la Rhetorique.” Ibid. 23. “[Faire] connoistre leur nom et redouter leur puissance, . . . sans le secours des Sciences et des Arts . . . l’art de rendre [l’ardeur naturelle de faire des conquestes] illustre par leurs Ecrits, . . . le lustre de cette réputation [of the Gauls’ greatness] s’efface peu à peu et s’esteint à la fin par la barbarie.” Ibid., 25–26. 24. Like Ferguson, Trials of Desire, Aaron Michael Wintroub highlighted the fear of barbarism. See The Savage Mirror and his Ph.D. dissertation, “To Triumph in Paradise.” 25. “Eh quoi! . . . un bon Français, désireux de tirer son pays de la barbarie et d’en illustrer le nom! . . . Espérez-vous que vous puissiez jamais dominer dans notre patrie si célèbre, si éloquente, si policée? C’est ici, vous, barbares et incultes. . . . Que sont ces nations d’au delà des Monts qui n’ont aucune connaissance des lettres humaines, ni des latines ni des grecques?” François Tissard, Supplique de François Tissard d’Amboise au corps très illustre et très studieux des étudiants de Paris (Paris, 1507), quoted in Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, 24. 26. Erasmus, “A Declaration on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children,” in Rummel, ed., The Erasmus Reader, 86. 27. “A cette entreprise est promis un facile et prochain succès, si vous le voulez. Travaillons donc de concert.” Guillaume Budé, quoted in Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, 24. 28. “Les estrangiers ne nous appelleront plus Barbares.” Dolet, La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre, 4–5. 29. “A ceux qui l’estiment [le Français] barbare et irreguliere, incapable de copie, qui est en la Greque et Romaine.” Du Bellay, La défense, I.ix.341. 30. “Nostre vulgaire est trop vil et barbare, pour traiter si hautes matieres que la philosophie,” “incapable de toutes bonnes lettres et érudition.” Ibid., I.x.353; I.i.325. 31. “Je ne puis assez blamer la sotte arrogance et témérité d’aucuns de notre nation, qui n’etans riens moins que Grecz ou Latins, déprisent et rejetent d’un sourcil plus que stoïque toutes choses ecrites en François: et ne me puys assez emerveiller de l’etrange opinion d’aucuns sçavans, qui pensent que nostre vulgaire soit incapable de toutes bonnes lettres et erudition.” Ibid., I.i.323−25. 32. Guillaume Budé, quoted in Wintroub, “Civilizing the Savage and Making a King,” 473. 33. “Dégénère de l’ancienne Grégeoise ou Romaine.” “Nous n’avons de si grands maistres et ouvriers de l’éloquence comme en Grèce ou Rome.” He feared “la disette de nos esprits” and “quelque tare chez nous,” quoted in Gillot, La querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, 114–20. 34. “Quelques Autheurs Italiens nous veulent blasonner de ce titre [de barbare].” Pasquier, Recherches de la France, I.ii.7. 35. Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène. René Radouant, the editor of this edition, wrote that this text was so sensational that it quickly sold, reaching its fourth edition two

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years after its first publication date. From 1683 to 1691, seven more editions were printed in Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere, and the work was translated into several languages. Colbert then asked Bouhours to be a preceptor to his eldest son; Racine asked him to read his writings and check the language. Boileau and La Bruyère also sought his counsel. 36. “Dès que les Romains se furent rendus les maîtres des Gaules, la langue romaine commença à y avoir cours, soit que cela vînt de la complaisance des vaincus, soit que ce fût un effet de la nécessité et de l’intéret, les sujets ne pouvant avoir d’accès auprès de leurs maîtres sans quelque usage de la langue latine, soit enfin que les ordonnances romaines qui obligeaient à faire tous les actes publics en latin fissent peu à peu cet effet. Les Romains imposaient le joug de leur langue aux vaincus avec celui de la servitude, comme parle saint Augustin.” Ibid., 217. This passage came from Bouhours’ first edition, although he subsequently deleted it. Pasquier wrote: “Les Romains, ayant vaincu quelques provinces établissaient des préteurs, présidents ou proconsuls, qui administraient la justice en latin, et saint Augustin, au livre XIX de la Cité de Dieu, nous rend très assuré ce discours quand il dit au chap. VII: Opera data est ut imperiossa civitas non solum jugum, verum etiam linguam demissis gentibus imponeret. Cela fut cause que les Gaulois sujets à cet empire s’adonnèrent, qui plus, qui moins, à parler et entendre leur langue, tant pour se rendre obéissants que pour entendre leur droit.” Pasquier, Recherches de la France, 218. Both Bouhours and Pasquier accentuated the Gauls’ status as the vainquished, forced into servitude. 37. René Radouant noted that Bouhours’ linguistic discussion was incorrect. However, its truth or falsity matters less for my purposes than the fact that Bouhours situated his remarks within France’s struggle for freedom from Rome’s linguistic domination. 38. “Ils sont comme des esclaves, qui portent toujours la marque et les livrées de leur maître.” Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 110. 39. “Au lieu que nous sommes comme des personnes qui jouissent d’une entière liberté. En ôtant à notre langue cette ressemblance sensible que ses voisines ont avec le latin, nous nous sommes fait en quelque façon une langue qui a plus l’air d’avoir été formée par un peuple libre que d’être née dans la servitude.” Ibid. 40. See Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? 69–94. 41. Cerquiglini, Une langue orpheline. 42. “Nous avons fait comme ces hommes de fortune, qui cachent aux autres et à euxmêmes ce qu’ils sont en déguisant le nom de leur famille, parce qu’il leur reproche la bassesse de leur naissance. . . . Les Romains se furent rendus maîtres des Gaules. . . . ne pouvant se rendre agréable aux victorieux qu’en tâchant de parler leur langage. . . . Ils le corrompirent, en le mêlant avec celui des Romains. Car, ne pouvant se défaire tout à fait de l’un ni apprendre tout à fait l’autre, ils les confondirent tous deux; et de cette confusion il résulta je ne sais quel jargon qu’ils appelèrent Romain, pour le distinguer du Latin. . . . Au lieu d’abolir ce langage barbare, s’y accommoderèrent eux-mêmes. . . . Le joug de leur langue aux nations vaincues avec celui de la servitude.” Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 104–5. 43. “Pour marquer qu’ils étaient les maîtres,” “ajoutèrent les et les autres au langage des pays où ils s’établirent plusieurs termes que le commerce porta ensuite de ville en ville et de province en province.” Ibid., 106–7.

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44. “n’était dans son origine qu’un misérable jargon, demi-gaulois, demi-latin, et demi-tudesque.” “Un horrible monstre.” “Ce monstre dura longtemps, la barbarie du langage ayant subsisté, avec celle des moeurs, pendant des siècles entiers.” Ibid.  45. “Ce mot barbare: barbares anciennement etoint nommez ceux qui ineptement parloient Grec. Car comme les etrangers venans à Athènes s’efforcoint de parler Grec, ilz tumboint souvent en ceste voix absurde βάρβαρος.” Du Bellay, La défense, I.ii.325. 46. barbare: “Les étrangers, quand ils venoient en Grece, . . . ils begayoient, parloient grossierement. Cependant on peut dire qu’ils appelloient barbares, ceux dont ils n’entendoient pas le langage, tels qu’etoient les Persans, les Sythes, les Egyptiens.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 47. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian. See also Pagden, Fall of Natural Man. 48. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 21. 49. Hall, in Inventing the Barbarian, demonstrated that the barbarian was the first form of otherness. 50. “Depuis les Grecz transportarent ce nom aux meurs brutaux et cruels, appellant toutes nations, hors la Grece, barbares.” Du Bellay, La défense, I.ii.325. 51. barbare: “Les Grecs appelloient Barbares, tous ceux qui n’etoient pas de leur pays.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 52. “Voyre jusques à l’egaller quasi à la Greque.” Du Bellay, La défense, I.vii.337. 53. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 85–90. 54. See Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes. 55. See Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 15–26. 56. barbare: “Une langue qui n’a pas de rapport à la nostre, ou qui est rude, et choque nostre oreille.” Le dictionnaire de l’Académie Française. 57. barbare: “Estranger qui est d’un pays fort éloigné, sauvage, mal poli, cruel, et qui a des moeurs fort différentes des nostres.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 58. “On peut commettre un barbarisme . . . en disant un mot qui n’est point François.” To speak French purely, “il n’y a qu’à éviter le barbarisme.” Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française, 567–68. This text was originally published in 1647. 59. diction: “Cette diction n’est pas Françoise, est barbare.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 60. Brague, Europe. See also Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation; Moatti, La raison de Rome. 61. Brague, Europe; Waswo, “The History That Literature Makes.” 62. Brague, Europe, 36.

chapter 3. relating the new world back to france 1. “Séparé . . . d’une mer si large, que les hommes ne l’ont jamais ni peu, ni osé traverser jusques à ces derniers siècles, pour découvrir nouvelles terres.” Lescarbot, L’Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, ed. W. L. Grant, 1:236. All the references to and translations of this text come from this edition.

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2. For a general discussion of travel writing in the early modern era, see Pioffet, ed. Ecrire des récits de voyage aux XVe–XVIIIe siècles; Mancall’s introduction to Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery; Rubiés, “Travel Writing and Humanistic Culture;” Binney, “Seventeenth-Century North American Travel Narratives.” See also Doiron, L’art de voyager. 3. Randall, “Cathedrals of Ice.” 4. relation: Récit de quelque aventure, histoire, bataille. . . . Relation se dit plus particulièrement des aventures des Voyageurs, des observations qu’ils font dans leurs voyages.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 5. voyage: “Il y a un très grand nombre de livres de Relations. Il y a plus de 1300 Relations de voyages imprimées.” Ibid. Gilles Boucher de la Richardière, at the beginning of the eighteenth century counted more than 1,500 relations in print. See Bibliothèque universelle des voyages. See also Roche, Humeurs vagabondes, 19–48. 6. For example, Father Claude d’Abbeville’s Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, or Voyages de Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618. 7. For a comparison between the French and British genre of relations, see Sayre, Les Sauvages Amériquains. 8. “Nostre nation a changé de gout pour les lectures et au lieu des romans qui sont tombés avec la Calprenède, les voyages sont venus en crédit et tiennent le haut bout dans la cour et dans la ville.” Chapelain, Lettres, 340–41. 9. “Le goust qu’on a aujourd’huy pour les Relations, et pour les Voyages, est devenu si général”; “la moindre particularité en est connue presque à tous les Européens.” Justel, preface to Recueil de divers voyages fait en Afrique et en Amérique, 5. 10. “Je prenois un plaisir incroyable à lire des livres de Voyage, des Relations de pais étrangers, et à tout ce que l’on disait des nouvelles découvertes.” Vairasse, Histoire des Sévarambes, 2. 11. See Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. 12. “Un homme de lettres dans son cabinet, touchant des spéculations qui ne produisent aucun effet”; “ne chercher plus d’autre science, que de celle qui se pourrait trouver . . . dans le grand livre du monde.” Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 30. 13. See Jacques-Chaquins’ introduction to her edition of Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstrance des mauvais anges et demons, 15–18. 14. See Melzer, “Le Nouveau Monde et la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes dans Le Furetière.” 15. See Romanowski, Through Strangers’ Eyes. 16. Pouliot, Etude sur les relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle France. 17. Châtellier, La religion des pauvres. 18. The lack of differentiation between the Catholics and Protestants emerged when the missionaries described their tasks of converting the Protestant or affirming the faith of the Catholic as essentially the same. In speaking about the Capuchin missions in Savoie, Father Charles de Genève wrote: “Nous ne devons pas faire moins d’état de la rénovation ou restauration d’un catholique, en le retirant du malheur où il s’était plongé, que de la conversion d’un hérétique qui y était sur le point de se perdre que d’un qui était déjà

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perdu.” Genève, Les trophées sacrées ou missions des Capucins en Savoie. Similarly, when Father Joseph de Paris sent missionaries into Poitou, he did not make any distinctions between the Catholic or Protestant other. He instructed the missionaries to approach the peasants “pour les instruire dans la foi et les y convertir s’ils étaient hérétiques ou les y affermir s’ils étaient déjà catholiques.” Lepré-Balain, La vie du R. Père Joseph de Paris, fol. 177, cited in Dompnier, Le Vénin de l’hérésie, 204. The term “hérétiques” specifically meant Protestants; Catholics were named more directly. 19. Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama; and Meyer, L’Europe et la conquête du monde. 20. Châtellier, La religion des pauvres. 21. Dompnier, Le vénin de l’hérésie, 276–79. Most of the evangelical work in regions outside France occurred in the seventeenth century right after the Treaty of Vervins in 1598. Prior to that, most of the missions were inside France itself. See also Deslandres, “Les missions françaises intérieures et lointaines, 1600–1650”; Dompnier, “La France du premier XVIIe siècle.” 22. Perouas. “Missions intérieures et missions extérieures françaises.” 23. Dompnier, “La France du premier XVIIe siècle,” 643–44. 24. “Empire de la croix.” Bouhours, La vie de St. François Xavier, 5. 25. Boucher, Les Nouvelles Frances, 17. 26. “A deux jeunes filles Sauvages qui se marieraient à quelques [Français] Chrétiens.” “Une honnete Dame dont on ne m’a point écrit le nom, a fait présent d’une bonne pièce d’argent pour marier . . . quelque fille Sauvage baptisée.” JR, XIV: 261.  27. Guitton, S.J., Saint Jean-François Régis. 28. See Davis, Women on the Margins, 63–140. 29. Axtell, Beyond 1492. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier. 30. “Les François seront-ils seuls entre toutes les Nations de la terre, privez de l’honneur de se dilater, & de se respandre dans ce Nouveau Monde. La France beaucoup plus peuplée, que tous les autres Royaumes, n’aura des Habitans que pour soy? ou bien si ses enfans la quittent, s’en vont qui de-çà, qui de-là perdre le nom de François chez l’Estranger . . . Ne vaudroit-il pas mieux décharger l’Ancienne France dans la Nouvelle, par des Colonies qu’on y peut envoyer, que de peupler les pays Estrangers?” JR, VIII: 8–10. 31. See Thwaites, introduction to The Jesuit Relations, 37–41. Thwaites conjectured that Sébastian Cramoisy discontinued publication of the Jesuit Relations in 1673 because of conflicts with Frontenac. However, other publishers continued to publish the Jesuit reports. 32. “Il s’y est acquis l’estime et la confiance d’un très grand nombre de personnes de qualité. . . . Le Roi même et la Reine mère lui tesmoignoient de l’affection.” Cited in Laflèche, Le missionnaire, xv. 33. See Donnelly, Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations, Errata and Addenda, 1–26. See also Laflèche, Le missionnaire, xvii. 34. See Greer, Introduction to The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America, 14–16. See also Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, vol. I, preface.

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35. Greer, introduction to The Jesuit Relations, 14. 36. Volumes 2 and 36 are exceptions. They were written in Latin. 37. Thwaites, introduction to the Jesuit Relations, 37−41. 38. Davis, Women on the Margins, 64. 39. Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 6–8. See also Todorov, The Conquest of America. 40. Columbus to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. 14 February–14 March 1493. Cited in Stavrianos, A Global History From Prehistory to the Present, 403. 41. Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 6. 42. See Chaunu, L’expansion européenne du XIII au XVe siècles, 235–37 for a discussion of the role of the printing press in disseminating information about Columbus’ “discovery.” 43. See Castillo, Colonial Encounters in New World Writing. See her chapter 2 for a discussion of the impact of Columbus on the texts written in his wake. 44. Vespucci, Letters from a New World, 492. 45. Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 8. 46. Cited in Castillo and Schweitzer, The Literatures of Colonial America, 100. 47. The problem of evangelization was more vexed in Spain because the debates were much more troubled by the question of whether the American Indians were really human, most especially the 1550 debates between Sepulveda and Las Casas at the Council of Valladolid. To be sure, this was also an issue in France, but not to the same extent. See Castillo, Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, chap. 2. 48. “Mandier leur pain de porte en porte: plusieurs se jettent dedans les vols & dans les brigandages publics; d’autres dans les larcins & tromperies secrettes.” “Fortifie-on la France; car ceux qui naistront en la Nouvelle France, seront François.” JR, VIII: 10−12. 49. Rushforth, ‘“A Little Flesh We Offer You.’” 50. Dobie, Trading Places. 51. Thomas Peace has observed that while the travelers initially called the Indians “sauvages,” over time as they spent more time in the New World, they increasingly used the tribal designations. See Peace, “Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage.” 52. For example, Bouhours, La vie de St. François Xavier. The Jesuit priest wrote a spiritual biography of St. Francs Xavier and continually referred to India as the New World. 53. See, for example, Pagden, European Encounters with the New World. 54. Paul, We Were not the Sauvages, 41. Thomas Peace and C. E. S. Franks have made similar arguments. See Peace, “Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage”; Franks, “In Search of the Savage Sauvage,” 549. 55. Greer, introduction to The Jesuit Relations, explains that he translated the French term “sauvage” as “Indian” except when its meaning is clearly “savagery.” See also Sayre, Les Sauvages Amériquains, preface. Many scholars use the term “Amerindian,” others reject it. My solution is to alternate among the various possibilities. 56. Peace has concluded that while the term “sauvage” was the dominant term, many authors such as Champlain over time used other alternatives as they came to know the

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inhabitants better. They used the term to suggest meanings that were positive, negative, and neutral. 57. Gliozzi, Adam et le Nouveau Monde, 11. 58. Hayden White has traced the sources of the image of the wild man in European thought, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity. The Greeks drew up its profile, which set the terms for all subsequent perceptions of this creature. The Roman travelers who wrote about their encounters with creatures of strange new lands poured their perceptions into the Greek mold, but made significant changes. This combined heritage was then filtered through the Judeo-Christian traditions, which associated the “sauvage” with concepts of sin and heresy. They formed distinct but similar archetypes, which then fed into Medieval and Renaissance thought. See White, “The Forms of Wildness” See also Dickason, Myth of the Savage. 59. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, xiii. 60. Furetière also used the Native Americans as the prototypical example of the “sauvage” in defining yet other terms. For example, his definition of “farouche” reads: “Les peuples de l’Amérique estoient la plus-part sauvages & farouches.” Key words such as “police” and “nation” are defined in opposition to “les sauvages de l’Amérique.” Furetière defined the Native Americans as lacking “police.” The term “police” was “opposé à barbarie. Les Sauvages de l’Amérique n’avoient ni loix, ni police, quand on en fit la decouverte.” Under “nation” Furetière wrote: “Les Cannibales sont des nations farouches et barbares,” and cannibals were associated with the New World. The New World Native American was the only example cited from France’s contemporary world, except for one brief phrase referring to Africa, in both dictionaries. The Turk is surprisingly absent from these definitions. I of course do not mean to suggest that the Turk was not an important figure of barbarism. To understand its importance, see Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama. The term “barbarian” meant cruel and inhuman. Thus Furetière defined “Turquerie” as “Manière d’agir cruelle et barbare, comme celle dont usent les Turcs.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 61. “barbare. Adj. Sauvage, qui n’a ny loix ny politesse. C’est un peuple barbare. Les Yroquois sont de vrais barbares. On appelle aussi, Barbare, Une langue qui n’a pas de rapport à la nostre, ou qui est rude, & choque nostre oreille. Les Yroquois parlent une langue fort barbare” (French Academy, s.v. Barbare). “barbare. Adj. Estranger qui est d’un pays fort éloigné, sauvage, mal poli, cruel, et qui a des moeurs forts differentes des nostres. . . . Les sauvages de l’Amérique sont fort barbares” (Furetière, s.v. Barbare). “sauvage. De certains Peuples qui vivent ordinairement dans les bois, sans religion, sans loix, sans habitation fixe, & plustost en bestes qu’en hommes. Les peuples sauvages de l’Amérique. . . . Les Sauvages de l’Amérique” (French Academy, s.v. Sauvage). “sauvage. Des hommes errans, qui sont sans habitations reglées, sans Religion, sans Loix, & sans Police. Presque toute l’Amerique s’est trouvée peuplée de Sauvages” (Furetière, s.v. Sauvage). 62. White, The Middle Ground. Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men.

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chapter 4. france’s colonial history 1. I reconstruct this scene based on Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, and on Razilly’s account in Mercure François, vol. 3 (1613–17), 163–80. 2. Sieur Lord Razilly was a distant relative of Richelieu and would later be a founder of the French colony at Acadia. 3. “Il n’y eut petit ny grand qui ne voulut s’informer et réjouir de notre arrivée.” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 335. 4. “[On] les fit habiller à la françoise; car selon la coutume du pays, ils vont tout nus, hormis quelque haillon noir qu’ils mettent devant leurs parties honteuses.” Malherbe to Peiresc, 15 April 1613, in Malherbe, Oeuvres de Malherbe, 3, 297. 5. “Un grand nombre de personnes de qualité qui rendoient tesmoignage du contentement qu’ils avoient de nostre saincte et heureuse conqueste, estans tous bien ayses de voir ces pauvres Sauvages revestus de leurs beaux plumages tenant leur Maracas en la main.” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 339.  6. “Mais qui eut jamais pensé que le peuple de Paris tant accoutumé à voir des choses rares et nouvelles se fut ému comme il a fait pour la venue de ces Indiens? Combien de fois en a on vu venir des nations barbares et estrangeres en cette ville, sans toutefois que personne en aye fait estat? Et voicy qu’à la venue de ces pauvres Indiens, Commota est universa civitas, tout Paris est en émeute, un chacun resentant en son coeur je ne sais quelle réjouissance. . . . Toutes les rues estoient pleines de peuple qui courait en affluence pour voir ce qui ne pouvait quasi croire.” Ibid., 340. 7. “Un si grand changement d’extremitez si contraires; de Loups, d’Agneaux; d’inhumains, Chretiens et enfants de Dieu.” Ibid., 370. 8. There were initially six Tupinamba boys who were to be baptized and married to French girls, but three of them died after arriving in France. 9. “Non pecheurs tels quels, mais Barbares, cruels et inhumains,” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 369. 10. “Sans loi et sans foi, nous entremangeant les uns les autres,” Ibid., 342. 11. “Ces animaux Cannibales et Anthropophages,” “enfans de la nation des Cannibales et Anthropophages.” Ibid., 372. 12. “Loups ravissans et Antropophages ou Cannibales.” Ibid., 370. 13. Many questioned whether the Native Americans were truly men. For example, several Dominican missionaries, among many others, propounded the view that the New World natives were akin to beasts and would never be capable of learning the mysteries of the faith. Popes intervened multiple times to assert the natives’ fundamental humanity. See Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 29–32. See also Le Clercq, First Establishment of the Faith in New France, vol. 1, 164–65. 14. Sara E. Melzer, “Magic and the Conversion of ‘Outsiders’ into ‘Insiders’.” 15. “Quelle douce harmonie y avoit-il pour lors au Ciel, et qu’elle mélodie de tous les bienheureux de voir ces belles prémices des Antropophages offertes à Dieu.” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 369.

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16. “C’estoit une merveille et un contentement tout ensemble pour les Parisiens de voir leurs Majestez tant affectionnées à ce sainct exercise. Ils furent à bon escient les Parrins.” Ibid., 378. 17. “De faire porter à tous trois ce grand nom de Louis pour rendre le nom du Roy leur parrin plus recommandables parmy les Barbares. . . . [Sa Majesté] donna librement son consentement, et ainsi furent tous trois appellez Louys.” Ibid., 369. 18. “Le Roi fit voir sur sa face un singulier plaisir de ce rencontre.” Ibid. 19. “Sur l’imposition des noms, la Reine trouva bon qu’on leur bailla Henri, Louis, et Jean.” Ibid. 20. “Les Princesses de sa suite faisoient paraitre aussi un très grand contentement qu’elles recevaient de voir ces nouvelles entes du Jardin de Jésus-Christ.” Ibid. 21. This treatment of a slave in France was in keeping with what historian Susan Peabody has described as the “Freedom Principle.” While the French state did foster slavery in its colonies—particularly in the Antilles, but not seriously in New France—it followed a rule that no slaves were allowed on French soil. As soon as a slave entered France, even if by trickery, he or she would automatically be freed. In every instance in which a case was brought to trial before the Parlement de Paris during the seventeenth century, the slave won his or her right to freedom. See Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France. For a discussion of the silence surrounding the question of slavery in France, see Reiss, “Descartes’ Silences on Slavery and Race.” 22. “Il recut les mesmes graces que les autres et fut fait enfant de Dieu” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 378. 23. “Leur modestie était si grande et leur maintien si dévot durant toutes les cérémonies de leur bapteme que si on ne les eut connu, l’on eut cru que toute leur vie, ils eussent été instruicts au Christianisme et cérémonies de l’Eglise.” Ibid., 371. 24. “Il est . . . d’une couleur moins brune que les autres, d’une face assez bien faite et le prendroit on plustot à sa facon pour Francois que pour un estranger Sauvage.” Ibid., 364. 25. “Nos enfans apprendrons la loy de Dieu, vos arts et sciences, et se rendront avec le temps semblables à vous autres; alors l’on fera des alliances d’une part et d’autre, si bien que dorenavant l’on ne nous prendra plus que pour François.” Mercure François, vol. 3, 169. My emphasis. 26. “L’on ne nous tiendra que pour Francois,” “à l’advenir nous ne serons plus qu’un peuple.” Ibid., 169, 171. My emphasis. 27. “Cet enfant n’a rien de sauvage que le teint et la couleur, sa douceur, sa docilité, sa modestie, son obeisance la ferait passer pour une petite Francaise bien née.” JR, IX: 104. 28. “Il y a des femmes prêtes pour eux . . . l’on n’attend que leur baptême pour accomplir des mariages, et allier la France avec l’île de Maragnan.” Malherbe to Peiresc, 23 June 1613, in Malherbe, Oeuvres de Malherbe, vol. 3, 313.  29. “Les Capucins, pour faire la courtoisie entière à ces pauvres gens, sont après à faire résoudre quelques dévotes à épouser, à quoi je crois qu’ils ont déjà bien commencé.” Malherbe to Peiresc, 29 June 1613, in ibid., vol. 3, 316.

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30. “Des personnes logées au bout du monde,” “allie[r] la Nouvelle France à l’ancienne.” JR, VI: 24. 31. For a discussion of this question, see Melzer, “L’histoire oubliée de la colonization Française.” See also Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France.” 32. “Détacher [les Algonkins et les Hurons] de leurs coutumes sauvages et les obliger à prendre les nostres, et surtout à s’instruire dans notre langue, au lieu que pour avoir quelque commerce avec eux nos français ont été nécessité d’apprendre la leur . . . et vous devez tacher d’attirer ces peuples surtout ceux qui ont embrassé le Christianisme dans le voisinage de nos habitations.” Colbert to Talon, 5 April 1667, in Rapport de l’Archiviste de la Province de Québec 45, 72; and Colbert to Laval, 7 March 1668, in Provost, Le séminaire du Québec. vol.1, 36. 33. See Nash, Red, White and Black, 103. 34. Quoted in Johnson, “Colonial New Orleans,” 25. 35. Ibid. 36. Castillo and Schweitzer, eds., The Literatures of Colonial America, 4. 37. Miguel Vale de Almeida, An Earth-Colored Sea; Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire. 38. Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 153–89. 39. Axtell, The Invasion Within. 40. “Ils seront François, & Hiroquois tout ensemble: car nous ne serons plus qu’un peuple.” “Non seulement nos coustumes, seront vos coustumes, mais nous serons si étroittement unis, que nos mentons se revestiront de poil, & de barbe comme les vostres.” JR, XXI: 44. 41. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV, 223–39; and Eccles, France in America, 34–51. Louis XIV and his ministers sought to reduce the clergy’s undue influence in the New World. They took over the French possessions in North America and made them a royal province, like other provinces in the kingdom. In so doing, the Crown assumed responsibility for their administration, justice, economic development, finances, and security. See also Gagnon, Louis XIV et le Canada, 1658−1674. 42. Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits, 20. 43. Jaenen, Friend or Foe; Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France”; Havard et Vidal, L’histoire de l’Amérique Française; Aubert, ‘“The Blood of France’.” 44. “Ces petites filles estans nourries à la façon des Chrétiens, puis mariées à quelques François, ou quelques Sauvages baptisés, retireront tant d’enfants de leur Nation que nous voudrons. Tout consistera . . . à les doter, à les ayder dans leur mariages.” JR, IX: 109. 45. “Voilà justement les moyens de rendre les mariages des Sauvages stables et indissolubles. Car un mari ne quittera pas si aisément une femme qui lui apporte un honneste dot, et une femme ayant ses biens auprès de nos habitations Françoises, ne s’en esloignera pas facilement non plus que de son mari.” JR, XIV: 262. 46. Father Jean de Brébeuf reported this statement, with great approbation, in his relation of 1636: “[Les Français] viendroient volontiers en leur pays, se marieroient à leurs filles.” JR, X: 25. See also JR, V: 209.

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47. Other religious groups had the same experience. The Recollects, Sepulcians, Ursulines, and the rest, all came over with great enthusiasm but soon realized that the Native Americans were not as eager to become like French Catholics as they had presumed. 48. Even before the Jesuits, the Recollects, a branch of the Franciscans, advocated some version of segregation, with Gabriel Sagard and Denis Jamet among its strongest advocates. However, their reasons for segregation were different. They wanted to protect the Native Americans from direct contact with the Europeans, as their goal was to establish the millennial kingdom in the New World. For a fuller discussion of this tension, see Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 153–89. 49. Stanley, “The Policy of ‘Francisation.’” 50. See JR, XXXVI: 172–73. 51. “Envoyer des peuplades et colonnies par delà, pour leur enseigner avec la connaissance de Dieu, la gloire et les triomphes des Votre Majesté de faire en sorte qu’avec la langue Françoise ils concoivent aussi un coeur et courage françois.” Champlain, vol. 3, ed. Biggar, 6. 52. Ibid., 146. 53. See Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France.” 54. “Les descendans des François qui s’habitueront audit pais [Canada].” Articles accordés par le Roy, à la compagnie de Canada des cent associés, establie sous le titre de Nouvelle France (1627), in Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents historiques rélatifs à la Nouvelle France, vol. 1, 90. See Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France.” 55. Richelieu inserted this ordinance in the founding document for the establishment of the trading company, called the Company of a Hundred Associates or the Company of New France. The ordinance reads: “Sa Majesté Ordonnera que les descendants des Français qui habitueront audit pais, ensemble les sauvages qui seront amenés à la connaissance de la Foy et en feront profession, seront censez et reputez naturels Francais, et comme tels pourront venir habiter en France quand bon leur semblera, et y acquérir, traicter, succeder, et accepter donations, et légats, tout ainsi que les vrays regnicoles et originaires Francais, sans estre tenus de prendre aucunes lettres de déclaration ni de naturalité.” Articles accordés par le Roy, à la compagnie de Canada des cent associés, establie sous le titre de Nouvelle France (1627), in Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents historiques relatifs à la Nouvelle France, vol. 1, 90. 56. See Dubost and Sahlins, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? See Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France. 57. Mercure François, vol. 14 (1627), 233. 58. Quoted in Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits, 43. Louis XIV to Laval, 2 March 1668, Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Mémoires et Documents, Amérique, vol. 5, 243. 59. “S’il se peut les y mesler, afin que par la succession du temps, n’ayant qu’une mesme loy et un mesme maitre, ils ne fassent plus ainsy qu’un mesme peuple et un mesme sang.” Colbert to Talon, 5 April 1667, in Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1931), 67. My emphasis. See also “Instruction pour M. de Bouteroue, 5 April 1668,” in Colbert, Lettres, vol. 3, 404.

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60. “Instruire les enfans des sauvages et à les rendre capable d’estre admis dans la vie commune des Francois, afin de n’en composer qu’un mesme peuple.” Colbert to the Abbot of Quéylus, 10 March 1671, Ibid., vol. 3, 452. My emphasis. 61. Colbert writes: “Instruits dans les maximes de notre religion and dans nos mœurs” so that “ils puissent composer avec les habitants de Canada un mesme peuple et fortifier, par ce moyen, cette colonie là.” My emphasis. Colbert wrote to Governor Frontenac, “Sa Majesté m’ordonne particulièrement de vous dire que . . . seulement il faut travailler à y attirer de nouveau Français du Royaume et à prendre soin de la conservation de ceux qui y sont par les mariages . . . mais mesme en attirant les sauvages dans la société et dans la forme de vivre des Français; et comme jusque à présent il paraist que les Jésuites ont eu des maximes contraires que les prestres des Seminaires habituez à Montréal ne s’y sont pas appliquez.” Colbert to Talon, 11 February 1671, in Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1931), 147. See Colbert to Frontenac, 13 June, 1673, Ibid. (1926–27), 25. 62. Colbert to Frontenac, 12 May 1678, ibid. (1927), 96. Cited in Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits, 55. 63. Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits, 37–48. 64. Talon reproached the Jesuits “for not having applied themselves until now as they should have to civilizing the Indians and improving their manners. They promised that they would endeavor to change these barbarians in all their missions, beginning with the language.” Talon to Colbert, 27 October 1667, Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1931), 84. 65. Another major object of controversy between the Crown and the Church was over the sale of alcohol to the Indians. See Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits; Eccles, The Canadian Frontier. 66. “La maxime des Jésuites n’a point esté d’appeler les habitants naturels du pays en communauté de vie avec les François, soit en leur donnant des terres et des habitations communes, soit par l’éducation de leurs enfans et par les mariages. Leur raison a esté qu’ils on cru conserver plus purement les principes et la sainteté de nostre religion en tenant les sauvages convertis dans leur forme de vivre ordinaire qu’en les appelant parmy les François.” Colbert, Lettres, vol. 3, 404. This was an instruction for M. de Bouteroue, 5 April 1668. 67. “Eloignée de toute bonne conduite, tant pour la religion que pour l’Etat. Il faut agir doucement pour la leur faire changer et employer toute l’autorité temporelle pour attirer les sauvages parmy les François, ce qui se peut faire par les marriages et par l’éducation de leurs enfants.” Ibid. 68. Talon to Colbert, 27 October 1667, Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1931), 84. 69. “Ils s’imaginent que par droit de naissance ils doivent jouir de la liberté de nos sauvages, ne rendant aucune subjection à qui que ce soit, sinon quand il leur plait.” JR, VI: 242. 70. L’Incarnation, Correspondance, 801–2. 71. In point of fact, many Native American tribes were not nomadic. It is likely that the French travelers saw them as such for two reasons. First, in perceiving the Native Americans as detached from the land, the French could have a stronger ground for laying claim

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to that land for themselves. Second, nomadism was built into the stereotypical image of the barbarian, especially because the Roman and Hellenistic Greek historiographers perceived the Gauls as nomads. Nevertheless Father Le Jeune perceived them as nomads: “Il me semble qu’on ne doit pas esperer grande chose des Sauvages, tant qu’ils seront errants; vous les instruisés aujourd’huy, demain la faim vous enlevera vos auditeurs, les contraignant d’aller chercher leur vie dans les fleuves et dans les bois. L’an passé je faisois le Catechisme en begaiant à bon nombre d’enfans, les vaisseaux partis, mes oyseaux s’envoleront qui d’un costé qui de l’autre.” JR, V: 163–71. 72. “Les hostelleries qu’on trouve en chemin sont les bois mesmes: . . . ayant le Ciel pour couverture de la maison. Le vin de ceste hostellerie c’est l’eau de neige fondue dans une petite chaudiere qu’on porte avec soy. . . Les meilleurs mets sont un peu d’anguille boucanée. . . . Coucher sur la terre couverte d’un peu de branches de pin, n’avoir qu’une écorce entre la neige et vostre teste, traisner votre bagage sur des montagnes, se laisser rouler dans des vallons espouvantables, ne manger qu’une fois en deux ou quand il n’y a point de chasse.” Ibid. 73. “La fréquentation d’un peuple civilisé.” Champlain, Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618, 264. 74. “Le seul moyen de disposer ces peuples à la connaissance du vray Dieu, estait de peupler ledit pais de naturels Français Catholiques, pour, par leur exemple, disposer ces peuples à la connaissance de la Religion Chretienne, à la vie civile, et meme y établisant l’autorité Royale.” Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents relatifs à la Nouvelle-France, vol. 2, 62. 75. “Comme le Roy m’a témoigné qu’il souhaittoit que l’on tâchast d’élever à la maniere de vie des François, les petits enfans Sauvages, pour les policer peu à peu; j’ai formé expres un Seminaire, où j’en ay pris un nombre à ce dessein; & pour y mieux réussir, j’ai esté obligé d’y joindre des petits François, desquels les Sauvages apprendront plus aisément, & les moeurs & la langue, en vivant avec eux.” JR, LII: 46. 76. “Attirer leurs pères et leurs mères dans nos habitations pour pouvoir mieux les instruire dans la religion chrestienne et dans les moeurs françoises.” Frontenac to the King, 6 November 1679, in Establie sous le titre de Nouvelle France (1627) Compagnie de Canada, Collection de manuscrits contenant lettres, mémoires, et autres documents historiques relatifs à la Nouvelle France, vol. I, 268. 77. “Pour leur enseigner avec la connaissance de Dieu, la gloire et les triomphes des Votre Majesté de faire en sorte qu’avec la langue Françoise ils conçoivent aussi un coeur et courage François.” Champlain, Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618, vol. 3. 78. Jacquin, “The Colonial Policy of the Sun King.” 79. See Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage; Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians.” 80. Deschamps, Les méthodes et doctrines coloniales de la France, 38. 81. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle France. 82. “Les mariages . . . s’y feront des Francois avec les Sauvages Chrestiennes,” then “en cette façon le pais se peuplera facilement. . . Et ces petites nations multiplieront plus en

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dix ans qu’elles n’ont fait par le passé en cent années au grand honneur de la France, qui y acquerra autant de sujets capables de secourir peut-estre quelque jour cet estat d’hommes, et marchandises utiles.” Daveluy, ed., Les véritables motifs, 107. 83. Dumas, Les filles du roi en Nouvelle-France. 84. Colbert to M. Harlay de Champvallon, Archbishop of Rouen, 27 February 1670, in Colbert, Lettres, 476. 85. Ibid., and Nash, Red, White and Black, 103–9. 86. JR, II: 71. The original is in Latin. 87. Cited in Pagden, Lords of All the World, 30. 88. Ibid., 23. 89. Ibid., 11–62. The French notion of assimilation was also grounded in the monastic and clerical disciplina of Christianity. In “Disciplina: The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility,” Knox describes how the soul was believed capable of transformation through changes in body comportment. 90. Cited in Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” 195. The original Latin version is in Shiels, King and Church, 277. “Orthodoxe fidei propagationem nostre cure celitus commissam et Christiane religionis augmentum et animarum salutem barbararum quoque nationum et aliorum indidelium quorumbliet depresionem et ad fidem conversionem supremis desiderantes affectibus.” See Codignola for a discussion of the church’s expansionism. 91. Matthew 28: 19. 92. Cited in Jaenen, “Problems of Assimilation in New France,” 256; and Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 153. See Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 2, 22. 93. “‘Venez, secourez nous, apportez en nostre païs le flambeau qui n’y a jamais esclairé!’” JR, VI: 25. 94. “De faire convertir, amener et instruire les peuples qui habitent en cette contrée, de present gens barbares, athées, sans foy ni religion, au Christianisme, et en la creance et profession de notre foy et religion: et les retirer de l’ignorance et infidelité où ilz sont.” Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, ed. W.L. Grant, 2: 217. All references to and translations of this text come from this edition. 95. “Nous renonç[ons] à toutes nos sottises, et foul[ons] aux pieds toutes nos vieilles façons de faire.” JR, XVI: 166. 96. For example, see White, The Middle Ground. 97. “Dieu ne se laisse point vaincre . . . mais Dieu se cache parfois, et alors le Calice est bien amer.” JR, IX, 124. 98. “Quand il faut devenir Sauvage avec les Sauvages.” Ibid., V: 168. 99. “Je ne scay pas si je deviens sauvage conversant tous les jours avec les sauvages.” Ibid., VII: 238. 100. See White, The Middle Ground, for a discussion of how the French traders and missionaries had to accommodate the Amerindians. 101. “Pourquoy est-tu donc entré icy, si tu ne veux pas estre du festin? Il faut que tu manges tout cela, autrement nostre banquet serait gasté.” JR, XI: 199.

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102. Boschet, Le parfait missionnaire. In this biography, Maunoir feared learning Bas Breton, lest this language corrupt his soul. 103. Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 65–70. 104. “Les rendre semblables à nous, leur donner la cognoissance du vray Dieu et leur apprendre à garder les saints commandemens, et que les marriages dont nous parlions seroient stables et perpetuels.” JR, XIV: 18. 105. “De se faire barbares et se rendre tout à fait semblables à eux.” Ibid. 106. “Pour ce qui estoit des mariages qu’il n’estoit pas nécessaire de faire tant de cérémonies que ceux des François qui estoient en résolution de se marier, avoient la liberté de prendre des femmes ou bon leur sembleroit, que ceux qui s’estoient mariez par le passé n’avaient point demandé un conseil général pour cela, mais qu’ils en avaient pris par ou ils en avaoient voulu.” JR, XIV: 16. 107. “Voila où nous en sommes de ces mariages; quelque uns de nos François avaient bien eu la pensée de passer plus outré, et d’en venir à l’exécution, et la chose semble estre bien avantageuse pour le Christianisme: mais quelques empechements se sont jettez à la traverse.” Ibid., 18. 108. “Il y a bien des considérations à faire avant que de s’engager dans le mariage, sur tout parmy des peuples barbares comme ceux-cy.” Ibid. 109. “L’on a cru bien longtemps que l’approche des sauvages de nos habitations était un bien considérable pour accoutumer ces peuples à vivre comme nous et à s’instruire de notre religion. Mais . . . tout le contraire en est arrivé car au lieu de les accoutumer à nos lois . . . ils nous communiquent fort tout ce qu’ils ont de plus méchant, et ne prennent eux-memes que ce qu’il y a de mauvais et de vitieuse en nous.” Denonville to Seignelay, 13 November 1685, quoted in Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 183. 110. “Tous les huit jours espousent des sauvageresses à la mode des Sauvages de ce payslà.” “Discipliner nos gens, régler la traite [des fourrures] dans les rivières entre nos coureurs de bois, sans quoy  ils se feront tous Sauvages et ruineront le commerce.” Denonville to Minister, 25 August 1687, AN C11A, vol. 9, fol. 75, quoted in Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France,” 526. 111. “Les enfants [des colons] s’accoutument à vivre en libertinage comme eux, mais memes abusent des filles et femmes sauvages qu’ils entretiennent avec eux, et menent à leur chasses dans les bois ou souvent ils souffrent de faim jusques à manger leurs chiens.” Cited in Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France,” 535. 112. “Il ne faut jamais meler un mauvais sang avec un bon, l’expérience que l’on a eue dans ce pays est que tous les Français qui ont épousé des Sauvageresses sont devenus libertins, devenant d’une indépendance insupportable et que les enfants qu’ils ont eus ont été d’une fanéantise aussi grande que les Sauvages eux-mêmes, on doit donc empêcher que l’on permette ces sortes de mariage.” Letter of October 1709, quoted in Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France,” 526. 113. Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism.” See Zoltvany, “New France in the West, 1701–1713.”

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114. Roy, La ville de Québec sous le régime Français; Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men. 115. “Les sauvages ne s’estoint point encor alliez des François par aucun mariage, et qu’on voyoit bien qu’ils ne vouloient pas estre un mesme Peuple avec nous.” JR, IX: 232. My emphasis, 116. The Jesuit Relations of 1646–47, for example, reported: “A savage pupil of the Ursuline seminary, after having remained there 4 years, when she left them was eagerly and urgently sought in marriage by a Frenchman named Chastillon . . . but it happened that the girl would not consent to have him and preferred a savage—following the wishes of her parents.” Ibid., XXX: 156. 117. “Ce n’est point que nous ayons besoin de vos filles ny de vos enfans; nous sommes peuplés comme les feuilles de vos arbres; mais nous voudrions bien ne voir plus qu’un Peuple en toutes ces terres.” Ibid., IX: 219. 118. Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men, 30. 119. Kirk, Many Tender Ties. 120. Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 43.

chapter 5. interweaving the nation’s colonial and cultural discourses 1. “Clio vint, l’autre jour, se plaindre au dieu des vers/ Qu’en certain lieu de l’univers/ On traitoit d’auteurs froids, de poëtes stériles,/Les Homères et les Virgiles./Cela ne sauroit être; on s’est moqué de vous,/Reprit Apollon en courroux:/Où peut-on avoir dit une telle infamie?/Est-ce chez les Hurons, chez les Topinamboux?/−C’est à Paris. –C’est donc dans l’hôpital des fous?/ −Non, c’est au Louvre, en pleine Académie.” Epigrams XXXII and XXXIII, entitled “Sur ce qu’on avoit lu à l’académie des vers contre Homère et contre Virgile,” in Boileau, Oeuvres complètes de Boileau-Despréaux, 148. 2. “J’ai traité de Topinamboux, / Tous ces beaux censeurs, je l’avoue, / Qui, de l’antiquité si follement jaloux, / Aiment tout ce qu’on hait, blâment tout ce qu’on loue; / Et l’Académie entre nous, / Souffrant chez soi de si grands fous, me semble un peu Topinamboue.” Ibid. 3. Elias, The Civilizing Process. 4. Apostolides, Le roi-machine, 67. See also Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, which describes how Louis XIV substituted himself for many figures of greatness, such as Alexander the Great and Jesus. 5. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV; and Eccles, France in America, 34–51. 6. For a description of this festival, see Perrault, Courses de testes. See Lynn Festa, “Empires of the Sun,” for a discussion of otherness in this festival. 7. Perrault, Courses de testes, 59. 8. Ibid., 8.

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9. “Le roy des Amériquains.” Ibid. 10. Brody, “Platonisme et classicisme.” 11. Greene, Light in Troy. See also Hampton, Writing from History; history was also a problem, albeit in a different way. Examples from the past are deceptive and can do more harm than good because the contingencies in the present make it impossible to use examples from classical antiquity. See also Randall, Building Resemblance, who discusses the issue of similarity and difference within a religious context. 12. Cave, The Cornucopian Text.

chapter 6. imitation as a civilizing process or as a voluntary subjection? 1. “Une éducation Françoise, et leur inspirant insensiblement la douceur de nostre domination, il effacera dans leurs coeurs, par la reconnaissance d’un traitement si favorable, tous les sentiments d’une affection étrangère, et y gravera profondément, par une noble institution, les caractères d’un amour sincère et fidelle pour nostre personne et pour nostre Estat.” Lettres patentes portant confirmation de la fondation du Collège des Quatre-Nations, printed in Franklin, ed., Recherches historiques sur le Collège des Quatre-Nations, 161. 2. “Gagner [leurs] coeurs, et de les rendre véritablement François.” Ibid. 3. Ibid., 70. 4. Ibid., 105. 5. Supple, “The Failure of Humanist Education.” 6. Rickard, French Language, 4. Marc Fumaroli, “Les Abeilles et les Araignées,” emphasized the growing power of the vernacular in the seventeenth-century world of letters. 7. Ibid., 4. Merlin, in La langue, contests this view. 8. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, Philip the Fair had decreed that French should be the language of royal edicts for the North of France. The South still used Latin. However, this edict did not have much force. See Greenfeld, Nationalism, 99. 9. Ibid., 99. 10. See Hammond, Fragmentary Voices. 11. “On maintiendra, par-dessus tout et très sévèrement, l’usage de parler latin, et l’on ne permettra jamais, pour tout ce qui se rapporte à la classe, d’employer le français. Le maître parlera continuellement en latin.” Règles communes aux professeurs des classes inférieures, art. 18, quoted in Snyders, Pédagogie, 60. 12. “Dans chaque classe sera établi un surveillant qui présentera au chef du collège une liste des écoliers . . . qui se seront servis de la langue vulgaire.” Règles communes aux professeurs des classes inférieures, art. 17. Cited in Snyders, Pédagogie, 32. 13. “Un grand nombre de préfets et d’autres gens qui vous observent, ne vous perdent jamais de vue, si vous ne faites pas un pas être observés, si dans vos chambres, à la salle d’étude, à l’église, au jeu, à la promenade et dans toutes vos récréations, vous êtes chacun sous les yeux de plusieurs préfets, et si l’on veille jour et nuit sur votre conduite.” Jean

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Croiset, Heures et règlements pour messieurs les pensionnaires (1711), 1e partie, XXVIII, quoted in Snyders, Pédagogie, 32. 14. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170−71. 15. “J’avais un régent à l’aspect terrible, qui se promenait toujours avec un fouet à la main.... La loi qui m’estoit la plus fâcheuse à observer sous son Empire était qu’il ne fallait jamais parler autrement que latin, et je ne me pouvais désaccoutumer de lâcher toujours quelques mots de ma langue maternelle: de sorte qu’on me donnoit tousjours ce que l’on appelle le signe, qui me faisait encourir une punition.” Charles Sorel, Histoire comique de Francion in Romanciers du XVIIe siècle, 170. 16. Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle. I, no. 14, 153. 17. Snyders, Pédagogie, 61. 18. Ibid., 60. 19. Paradoxically, Christian schools esteemed the language and literature of pagan civilizations. Religious thinkers, such as Pierre Nicole, believed they could adapt immoral pagan texts for Christian purposes. 20. “Quant à ces misérables livres modernes qui se sont glissées dans les collèges, il faut les rejeter et revenir à des sources plus pures.” A schoolteacher “doit surtout se garder de se trop passionner pour des ouvrages écrits dans sa langue maternelle, surtout par les poètes qui lui feraient perdre la plus grande partie de son temps, et même de sa moralité.” Father Joseph Jouvency, De Ratione, Iere Partie, chap. I, art. 3, cited in Snyders, Pédagogie, 106. 21. “Je vous exhorte à ne pas donner toute votre attention aux poètes français. Songez qu’ils ne doivent servir qu’à votre recréation, non pas faire votre véritable étude.” Racine, letters of 3 June 1693 and 9 October 1692, cited in Snyders, Pédagogie, 106. 22. “à toute personne, à peine de vie, de tenir ni enseigner aucune maxime contre les anciens auteurs et approuvés.” Snyders, Pédagogie, 32. 23. “n’expliquera aucun livre ou aucun auteur en dehors de la liste officielle; il n’introduira aucune méthode nouvelle d’enseignement ou de dispute.” Ibid. 24. Snyders, Pédagogie, 38. 25. See Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 149. 26. “Dans la congrégation des pensionnaires, séparés des externes et de tous ceux qui n’ont pas la même éducation que vous.” Father Jean Croiset, Heures et Règlements, Ie partie, IX, quoted in Snyders, Pédagogie, 37. 27. The military elite, the noblesse d’épée, did not value Latin because they were content with a rudimentary education in letters. They preferred the military arts over arts and letters. See Supple, Failure of Humanist Education. 28. “Fait une tache à notre honneur,” “déshonorer une langue qui a esté cultivée avec tant de soin par tous les Rois vos prédecesseurs.” Charpentier, Défense de la langue française, preface. 29. “Une Langue particulière. ”Ibid. 30. “La langue Française n’est pas renfermée dans les limites de la France.” It is “cultivée avec ambition par les étrangers.” France’s ambassadors spoke French “partout où ils vont.” Ibid., 173, 24, 25.

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not es to pag e s 14 3 –145 31. “Un Latin à demy barbare.” Ibid., 22.  32. “Ont regardé comme un Monstre” that was “le Singe de la Grecque.” Ibid., 21–22,

53. 33. “Tout le Royaume de Naples parloit Grec. . . . C’était la langue de toutes les Nations civilisées. C’était en vérité la langue universelle.” Ibid., 22, 12. 34. “Impuissan[t]” and “pauvre,” “cette langue étrangère si fameuse et si chérie.” Ibid., 7. 35. “Ce grand respect que l’on a pour la langue latine n’est qu’une suite des impressions qu’on nous donne en jeunesse, lors qu’on nous force de l’apprendre dans les escholes et qu’on nous deffend l’usage de la nostre.” Ibid., 375. 36. “On ne nous laisse que la liberté d’y applauder.” Ibid., 35. 37. “Je ne scay quoy de fade ou de mesprisable.” “Leurs oreilles sont si doucement flattées des noms grecs et romains.” Ibid. 38. “La langue des Scipions et des Caesars.” Ibid., 376. 39. Charles Perrault made a similar argument, complaining that in using the Ancients as the measure of greatness, France’s humanists blinded themselves to “la beauté de notre Siècle à qui le Ciel a departi mille lumières,” deprecating themselves as “gens sans goust et sans autorité.” Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 92. 40. “On voit de loin une grande ville dont on ne remarque que le haut des tours, le faiste des palais et les domes des temples, car on se figureroit aisément, sur cette premier apparence, que tout en est beau et magnifique; mais quand on est dedans on n’y remarque plus que des rues estroites et boueuses, qu’une confusion de petites maisons pressées et mal basties, et l’on se demande quelquefois où est la ville qu’on avait veue.” Charpentier, Défense, 376. 41. “Faut-il . . . chercher dans une langue étrangère des paroles pour expliquer son bonheur, et se servira-t-elle d’une autre bouche que de la sienne?” Charpentier,  De l’excellence de la langue française, préface, épitre au roi. 42. “Superstitieuse servitude dont nous captivons nos esprits à la suite de droict ancien.” Pasquier, Oeuvres, vol. II, lettre I), 213. 43. “Quoi? nous porterons donc le nom de Français, c’est-à-dire, de francs et libres, et néanmoins nous asservirons nos esprits sous une parole aubaine!” Pasquier, Choix de lettres, 75. 44. Pelletier, Art poétique, 221, 114, quoted in Waswo, “The Rise of the Vernaculars,” 414. 45. Pelletier, Art poétique, 114, quoted in Waswo, “The Rise of the Vernaculars,” 414. 46. Waswo, Rise of the Vernaculars, 409–16. 47. “Transporter [les élèves] dans d’autres pays et dans d’autres temps.” Rollin, Discours préliminaires au traité des études, 15. 48. “Sans elle nous demeurons toujours dans une espèce d’enfance qui nous laisse étrangers à l’égard du reste de l’univers.” Ibid., Propos L. VI, quoted in Snyders, Pédagogie, 94. 49. “J’ai honte d’être, en quelque sorte, étranger dans ma propre patrie, après avoir parcouru tant d’autres pays.” Ibid.

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50. “Il ne serait pas raisonnable qu’uniquement occupés de l’étude des auteurs grecs et latins et peu curieux de faire connaissance avec les écrivains de leur pays, (les jeunes gens) demeurassent toujours étrangers dans leur propre patrie.” Ibid., 109. 51. “Leur langue naturelle comprendront avec bien moins de peine ce qu’ils lisent en cette langue qu’en une autre dont ils n’ont encore aucune idée.” Ibid., cited in Snyders, Pédagogie, 72. 52. “Leur langue naturelle comprendront avec bien moins de peine ce qu’ils lisent en cette langue qu’en une autre dont ils n’ont encore aucune idée.” Thomas Guyot, Billets que Ciceron a écrits à son ami Attique, quoted in Snyders, Pédagogie, 73. 53. Snyders, Pédagogie, 84–110. 54. “Dès que les Romains se furent rendus les maîtres des Gaules, la langue romaine commença à y avoir cours, soit que cela vînt de la complaisance des vaincus, soit que ce fût un effet de la nécessité et de l’intéret, les sujets ne pouvant avoir accès auprès de leurs maîtres sans quelque usage de la langue latine, soit enfin que les ordonnances romaines qui obligeaient à faire tous les actes publics en latin fissent peu à peu cet effet. Les Romains imposaient le joug de leur langue aux vaincus avec celui de la servitude, comme parle saint Augustin.” Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 217. This passage came from Bouhours’ first edition. He deleted it because he was accused of plagiarizing the following passage from Etienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France: “Les Romains, ayant vaincu quelques provinces établissaient des préteurs, présidents ou proconsuls, qui administraient la justice en latin, et saint Augustin, au livre XIX de la Cité de Dieu, nous rend très assuré ce discours quand il dit au chap. VII: Opera data est ut imperiossa civitas non solum jugum, verum etiam linguam demissis gentibus imponeret. Cela fut cause que les Gaulois sujets à cet empire s’adonnèrent, qui plus, qui moins, à parler et entendre leur langue, tant pour se rendre obéissants que pour entendre leur droit.” Pasquier, Les recherches (Paris, 1560), 218. They both accentuated the Gauls’ status as the vainquished and their relationship of servitude to the Romans, as well as the Gauls’ complicity with their colonizers. 55. “Toutes les Gaules ayant été subjugées et réduites en provinces par les Romains, les Gaulois apprirent la langue latine, et commencèrent à rédiger tous actes en latin.” Dupleix, Mémoires des Gaules, 90. 56. Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? 57. Jung, Hercule dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle; Bardon, Le portrait mythologique, 49. See also Hallowell, “Ronsard and the Gallic Hercules Myth.” Joannes Annius of Viterbo and Jean Lemaire de Belges saw the Gallic Hercules as the direct ancestor to the Pepin kings and Charlemagne. 58. Hermann, La renaissance, 187–88. 59. “Les liens estoient petites chaines d’or et d’ambre bien faites.” Ibid., f. 3. 60. “Tirez et menez, toutefois il n’y en a pas un qui s’en veuille reculer, combien qu’ils le pourraient bien faire facilement, si le voulaient. Ils ne reculent point, et ne retirent le pied en arrière en eux repanchant, mais tous alègres et joyeulx le suivent en eux émerveillant de luy. Tous de leur plein gré se hastent de le suivre, et en laschant leurs liens s’estudient marcher plutost que luy, quasi comme s’ils estoient marriez qu’ils fussent déliez.” Ibid.

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61. “Les Romains qui ont eu domination sur la plus grande partie du monde, ont plus prosperé et plus obtenu de victoires par leur langage que par leur lance.” Tory, Champ Fleury, f. 5. 62. Tacitus, The Life of Agricola and the Germania, 22. 63. “Magnifiques, superbes, victorieux, dompteurs des nations les plus belliqueuses: des Italiens, Espagnols, Anglois, Hongrois, Esclaves, Sythes, Macedoniens, Bithyniens, Syriens et même des Grecs et Romains qui maitrissoient les autres.” Under “leur florissant empire” the others were “généreusement subjugées.” “Le seul nom des Gaulois était horrible et épouvantable aux Romains.” Dupleix, Mémoires des Gaules, 12. 64. “Par ruses et artifices,” conquering through friendship and kindness, or by “amitié et douceur, ou par ruse et artifice, non par armes et à force ouverte.” Ibid. 65. “Gaigner le coeur.” Ibid. 66. “Demy-barbares.” Ibid., 221. 67. “Jules César, et la ruse des Romains,” had conquered the Gauls “par les attraits des lettres et par les titres spécieux d’honneur.” Savaron, Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement, 5–6. 68. “Faisoit sortir de sa bouche plusieurs chaisnes d’or et de pierreries, qui tenoient un nombre infiny de personnes attachées par les oreilles, en sorte qu’elles paroissoient suivre ce Héros, plustot de leur bon gré, que par la nécessité de ces chaisnes si legeres et si faciles à rompre.” Ibid., 228–29. 69. “Un Symbole du génie de la Nation.” Charpentier, Défense, 228. 70. “Fleschir les coeurs par les charmes du discours.” Ibid. 71. Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 36–37. Bouhours’ puffed-up fantasy of world domination was widely shared in France; as soon as this text was published in 1671, it quickly sold out. By 1673, it was already up to its fourth edition, with seven more editions appearing from 1683 to 1691 in Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere and translated into several languages. Bouhours’ prestige made Colbert ask this learned Jesuit to be a preceptor to his eldest son; Racine, Boileau, and La Bruyère asked him to read their writings and sought his counsel. 72. “Tous les étrangers qui ont de l’esprit se piquent de savoir le français” and that “il n’y a guère de pays dans l’Europe où l’on n’entende le Français.” “Elle a cours parmi les sauvages de l’Amérique et parmi les nations de l’Asie les plus civilisées.” Ibid., 36−37. 73. “Les Persans étudient le Français avec un ardeur incroyable. Je ne sais même si les Chinois et les Japonais ne l’étudient pas aussi, depuis qu’il y a des Français parmi eux. . . . Si la langue Française n’est pas encore la langue de tous les peuples du monde, il me semble qu’elle mérite de l’être.” Ibid., 38. 74. “Presque aussitôt que la sienne, comme par un instinct secret qui l’avertit malgré lui qu’il doit un jour obéir au Roi de France, comme à son légitime maître.” Ibid. 75. “Néglig[ent] tout à fait leur langue naturelle, et à se faire honneur de ne l’avoir jamais apprise.” Ibid. 76. “Toutes les langues fussent réduites à une seule.” Ibid. 77. “Tous les peuples s’entendissent comme nous nous entendons.” Ibid., 35. 78. “Tentez de son amour  ” for the French language, foreigners “conçoivent une

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secrette envie d’abolir les leurs, pour ne parler plus que François.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie, 44. 79. “Etrangers . . . amoureux de cette langage qu’ils ont méprisée jusqu’ici.” Pellisson, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie Française, 468. 80. Johnson, “Colonial New Orleans.” 81. See Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV; and Apostolides, Le roi-machine. 82. “Attacha [les Gaules] par des liens si puissants et volontaires, qu’ils ne furent jamais tentés de les rompre.” Rollin, Discours préliminaires au traité des études, 318. 83. Marc Lescarbot was a traveler, a lawyer and a poet. Haunted by the memory of the religious wars, he imagined a New France in Canada as the true City of God where the French would live in peace with virtuous savages. He left France in 1606 with Poutrincourt to participate in an expedition sponsored by the king’s Lieutenant de Monts. For more information about Lescarbot, see Thierry, Marc Lescarbot; Brazeau, Writing a New France, 1604−1632. 84. “Cependant les Sauvages de tous les environs venoient pour voir le train des François, et se rangeoient volontiers aupres d’eux: meme en certains differens faisoient le sieur de Monts juge de leur debats, qui est un commencement de sujection volontaire, d’où l’on peut concevoir une esperance que ces peuples s’accoutumeront bientôt à notre façon de vivre.” Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. II, 509. 85. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 85. 86. “Nouvellement conquise non par armes, mais par la Croix, non par la force, mais par l’amour, qui a si doucement forcé les Indiens de donner, et eux et leur pays, au Roy de France, qu’après avoir eux mesmes planté la Croix en signe qu’ils desirent estre enfants de Dieu, ils plantent aussi avec les François les armes et Estendarts de la France au milieu de leur terre, à ce qu’on reconnaisse qu’entre toutes les Nations, nostre Roy tres-Chrestien, en est le souverain maitre et paisible possesseur, tellement qu’estant de droit Roy de France et de Navarre, aussi est il par toutes les loix, le Roy des Indes ou plustot de la France Equinoctiale.” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucin, 164. 87. “Ta bonté, ta douceur, et ta façon démontrent que tu nous governeras sagement. Les Toupinambous n’ont jamais obey par force et violence. Depuis que je leur commande je me suis trouvé bien de les avoir régis avec douceur. J’espère (grand guerrier) que tu en feras de mesme; la douce conversation que nous avons eue avec les François depuis plusieurs années nous le faict croire.” Mercure François, vol. 3, 172. 88. “Si tu veux bien faire est d’habiter ce pays, et amener femmes, et enfants lesquels venant en ses régions, nous verrons comme tu sers ce Dieu que tu adore, et de la façon que tu vis avec tes femmes, et enfants, de la manière que tu cultives les terres, et en semant, et comme tu obeys à tes loix, et de la façon que l’on nourrit les animaux, et comme tu fabrique tout ce que nous voyons sortir de tes inventions.” Champlain, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, vol. III, 146. 89. “L’esperance que nous avons que nos enfants apprendront la loy de Dieu et vos arts et sciences, nous faict croire qu’à l’advenir nous ne serons plus qu’un peuple et que l’on ne nous tiendra que pour Francois.” Mercure François, 171.

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90. “C’est pourquoy nous te supplions de nous dire ta volonté, que nous suivrons aussi bien qu’en ce que tu ordonneras.” Ibid., 174. 91. “Qui les verroit dy ie demandans secours, et proferans les parolles que disait ce Macedonien à Sainct Paul, Transiens in Macedoniam adiuua nos: Venez, secourez nous, apportez en nostre païs le flambeau qui n’y a jamais esclairé!’” JR, VI: 25. 92. “ Ils sont dé-ja las de leurs miseres & nous tendent les bras pour estre assistez.” Ibid., V: 32. 93. Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 1, 17. 94. Ibid., 6. 95. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 10. 96. “S’accoutumeront tellement à nos vivres, et à nos habits, qu’ils auront horreur des Sauvages et de leurs saletez. Nous avons vu l’exemple de cecy en tous les enfans nourris parmy nos François.” JR, IX: 106. 97. “Voilà pourquoy je ne sçache point parmy eux qui ne prefere en sa maladie la plus pauvre maison des François à la plus riche Cabane des Sauvages. Quand ils se verront bien couchez, bien nourris, bien logez, bien pensez, doutez vous que ce miracle de charité ne leur gagne le coeur?” Ibid., 101. 98. “De petits singes, . . . ils imitent tout ce qu’il voyent faire.” JR, XXXII: 224. 99. “ Il est croyable que depuis que les fondemens de ce nouveau monde sont jettez, ils n’avoient jamais representé aucune procession, mais comme ils en voyent de temps en temps, ils ont commencé d’en faire à leur mode.” Ibid. Another example of imitation: “We have one little girl, among others, named Marie Aoesiwa, who has not her equal. Her whole satisfaction seems to be in making the sign of the Cross and in saying her Pater and Ave. Scarcely have we set foot in her Cabin, when she leaves everything to pray to God. When we assemble the children for prayers or for Catechism, she is always among the first, and hastens there more cheerfully than many would to play. She does not stir from our Cabin, and does not omit making the sign of the Cross, and saying over and over fifty times a day the Pater and Ave. She gets others to do the same; and, one of our Frenchman having newly come, her only greeting was to take his hand, and have him make the sign of the Cross. Often she is in the field when our Fathers recite their Office there; she stands in the road, and, almost every time they return, she begins to make the sign of the Cross, and to pray to God in a loud voice. . . . Many older girls take pleasure in imitating the younger ones. When they are returning from the forest, they often stop the first of our Fathers whom they meet, and say to him, ta arrihwaienstan sen, ‘Teach me, I pray thee’; and although they may be well laden, they are not satisfied unless he has them say the Pater and the Ave. Sometimes they anticipate us, and, from as far as they can see one of our Fathers, they begin to recite what they know. What a consolation to hear these districts resound with the name of Jesus, where the devil has been, so to speak, adored and recognized as God during so many ages.” Ibid., X: 23. 100. “Les hommes quand il fait un peu chaud vont tous nuds, hormis une pièce de peau qu’ils mettent au dessous de nombril jusques aux cuisses. Quand il fait froid, ou

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bien à l’imitation des Européens, ils se couvrent de peaux de Castor, d’Ours, de Renard, et d’autres tels animaux, mais si maussadement, que cela n’empeche pas qu’on ne voye la pluspart de leur corps.” Ibid., V: 22. 101. “J’ay tant lavé mes mains, qu’il n’est possible qu’il soit resté quelque chose, du mal qu’il m’auroit peu causer.” Ibid., XXII: 184. 102. “Cette innocence est pleine de recréation.” Ibid. 103. For another example of this “progress,” see also Ibid., 61–63. 104. Vespucci wrote: “They live together without a king and without authorities, each man his own master. They take as many wives as they wish, and some may couple with mother, brother with sister, cousin with cousin, and in general men with women as they chance to meet.” Letters from a New World, 49–50. 105. “L’esprit ne manque pas aux Sauvages de Canada, si bien l’éducation et l’instruction.” JR, V: 31. 106. For a study of the Frenchification process, see Melzer, “L’histoire oubliée.” See also Saliha Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France;” Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits. 107. “Fais luy . . . tout ce que tu fais aux enfants des François.” Ibid., 14. 108. “On avait emmaillotte ce petit Chrestien à la Françoise, sa mère le tenant disoit à son mary, je ne scay qu’a nostre petit Francois Olivier; quand il est accommode à la Françoise, il rit toujours; quand je l’accommode a nostre facon, il pleure et se chagrine, et quand je le tiens il est tout triste et tout morne; et quand une Française le tient vous diriez qu’il veut toujours sauter. Elle vouloit par ce discours tesmoigner le contentement qu’elle avoit de voir son fils comme devenu François.” Ibid., 16. 109. “Ces petites filles sont vêtues à la Françoise; elles ne se soucient non plus des Sauvages, que si elles n’estoient pas de leur Nation.” Ibid., 102–3. 110. “Qu’ils ne regardent les Sauvages que pour les fuir, ou se mocquer d’eux.” Ibid., 106. 111. “De les depaiser.” Ibid., 102. 112. “Quittons nos anciennes facons de faire pour prendre celles qu’on nous enseigne qui sont meilleures que les nostres.” Ibid., XVI: 76. 113. “Il me semble que je suis autre que ne n’estois, que j’ay une autre vie en moy.” Ibid., 164. 114. “Renoncons a toutes nos sottises, et foul[e] aux pieds toutes nos vieilles façons de faire.” JR, X: 25−26. 115. “C’est ainsi qu’ils appellent le changement de leur vie Payenne & Barbare, en une vie civile & Chrestienne.” Ibid. 116. “Voir manger devant ses yeux les plus frians morceaux.” JR, XVI: 81. 117. “Ne faut-il pas que nous souffrions un petit aussi bien que les autres Chretiens, nous voulons contenter Dieu aussi bien que vous autres.” JR, XVI: 80. 118. “Et que ceste abstinence eut deue estre practiquee par un Sauvage qui s’est autrefois repeu de chair humaine!” Ibid.

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119. “S’en retourne par fois [aux] Cabanes des Sauvages, son père extremement aise de voir sa fille bien couverte, et en fort bon point, ne lui laisse pas demeurer longtemps la renvoyant en la maison, où elle demeure.” Ibid., X: 25. 120. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 62. 121. “C’estoit la pensée d’Aristote, que le monde avoit fait comme trois pas, pour arriuer à la perfection qu’il possedoit de son temps. Au premier les hommes se contentoient de la vie, ne recherchants purement & simplement que les choses necessaires & vtiles pour sa conservation. Au second ils ont conjoint le delectable auec le necessaire, & la bienseance avec la necessité. On a trouué premierement les viures, puis les assaisonements, on s’est couuert au cõmencement contre la rigueur du temps, & par après on a donné de la grace & de la gentillesse aux habits, on a fait des maisons aux premiers siecles simplement pour s’en servir, & par apres on les a fait encore pour estre veuës. Au troisiéme pas les hommes d’esprit voyans que le monde iouyssoit des choses necessaires & douces pour la vie, ils se sont adonnez à la contemplation des choses naturelles, & à la recherche des sciences, si bien que la grande Republique des hommes s’est petit à petit perfectionnée, la necessité marchant deuant, la bien-seance & la douceur venant apres, & les sciences tenant la dernier rang.” Ibid., VII: 7. 122. “Comme ils ne se couvrent que contre l’injure du te˜ps, si tost que l’air est chaud, ou qu’ils entrent dans leurs Cabanes, ils iettent leurs autours à bas, les homes restãs tous nuds, à la reserue d’vn brayer qui leur cache ce qui ne peut estre veu sans vergogne. Pour les femmes elles quittent leur bonnet, leurs manches & bas de chauffes, le reste du corps demeurant couvert.” Ibid., 11. 123. “Il y en a néanmoins qui portent des manches, des chausses, et des souliers, mais sans autre façon que celle que la nécessité leur a appris.” Ibid., V: 25. 124. “Ils ne pensent qu’à vivre, ils mãgent pour ne point mourir, ils se couvrent pour bannir le frois, non pour paroistre.” Ibid., VII: 7. 125. “Leurs bas de chauffe sont de poil [peau] d’Orignac passée sans poil, c’est la nature & non l’art, qui en a trouvé la façon, ils sont tout d’une venue, suffit que le pied & la jambe y passent, pour estre bie˜ faits, ils n’ont point l’invention d’y mettre des coins.” Ibid., 15. 126. “On a fait des maisons aux premiers siecles simplement pour s’en servir, & par apres on les a fait encore pour estre veuës. ” Ibid., 7. 127. “Pendant l’hiver toutes sortes d’habits leurs sont propres, & tout est commun tant aux femmes comme aux hommes: il n’y a point de difformité en leurs vestemens, tout est bon, pourueu qu’il soit bie˜ chaud.” Ibid., 9. 128. “Comme un fagot.” Ibid., 11. 129. “Dõnez leur un chaperon, un homme le portera aussi bien qu’une femme, il n’y a habit de sol dont ils ne se servent sagement, s’ils s’en peuvent server chaudement.” Ibid., 9. 130. “Si un garçon se vestoit en fille dans l’Europe, il feroit une mascarade. En la nouvelle France, la robe d’une femme n’est point mal-seante à un homme. Les Meres Ursulines, aiant donné une robe à une jeune fille, qui sortoit de leur seminaire, le mary qui l’espousa, s’en seruit bientost après, aussi gentiment que sa femme; & si les François s’en mocquoient, il n’en faisoit que rire, prenant leur gausserie pour une approbation.” JR, XLIV: 288.

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131. “A la nouvelle facon.” Ibid., 18. 132. “En moins de rien grasses comme des torchons de cuisine.” Ibid., 18. 133. “C’est ce qu’ils demandent, car l’eau, disent-ils, coule là-dessus, et ne penetre pas jusqu’à leurs robbes.” JR, VII: 18. 134. “Peuples policés”; “heureux esclaves.” Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 36. 135. “Comme un coursier indompté hérisse ses crins, frappe la terre du pied et se débat impétueusement à la seule approche du mords, tandis qu’un cheval dressé souffre patiemment la verge et l’éperon, l’homme barbare ne plie point sa tête au joug que l’homme civilisé porte sans murmure, et il préfere la plus orageuse liberté à un assujettissement tranquille. ” Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, 164. 136. “Etendent des guirlandes de fleurs sur les chaînes de fer dont ils sont chargés, étouffent en eux le sentiment de cette liberté originelle pour laquelle ils semblent être nés, leur font aimer leur esclavage et en forment ce qu’on appelle des peuples policés.” Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 36. 137. “Et quand la barbarie des meurs de notz ancestres eust deu les mouvoir à nous appeler barbares, si est ce que je ne voy point pourquoy on nous doive maintenant estime telz.” Du Bellay, ed. Helgerson, La défense, I.ii.325. All the references to and most of the translations from this text come from this edition. 138. “Le tens viendra (peut estre) et je l’espere . . . que nostre Langue . . . qui commence encor à jeter ses racines, sortira de terre, et s’elevera en telle hauteur et grosseur, qu’elle se poura egaler aux mesmes Grecz et Romains, produysant comme eux des Homeres, Demosthenes, Virgiles et Cicerons.” Ibid., I.iii. 329. My emphasis. My emphasis. 139. “Nostre Langue, qui commence encores à fleurir sans fructifier, ou plus tost, comme une plante et vergette, n’a point encores fleury.” Ibid., I.iii.329. My emphasis. 140. “Encores rampante à terre.” Ibid., I.vii. 339. 141. “Hausser la teste et s’elever sur piedz.” Ibid. 142. “Mais le tens viendra paravanture . . . que quelque bonne personne, non moins hardie qu’ingenieuse et scavante, non ambitieuse, non craignant l’envie ou hayne d’aucun, nous otera cete faulse persuasion, donnant à notre Langue la fleur et le fruict des bonnes Lettres.” Ibid., I.x. 353−55. 143. “Pauvre et nue”; “des ornements et des plumes d’autruy.” Ibid., I.iii. 327. 144. “Elever [le français] à la dignité du Grec et du Latin.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie, 34. 145. “Nous désirons qu’elle acquiere assez de vigueur, pour se pouvoir un jour esgaler à la magnificence des Anciennes. Elle n’est pas incapable, comme quelques-uns s’imaginent, d’atteindre à la hauteur d’une si pénible entreprise.” Ibid., 42. My emphasis. 146. “La Langue que parle son Roy, qui porte ses commandements, et qui doit publier sa gloire, est encore mise par quelques-uns au nombre des barbares.” Ibid., 32. 147. “Ce projet . . . n’est pas l’ouvrage ni d’un seul homme, ni d’un seul jour.” Ibid., 34. 148. “Résister à la décadence générale des choses du monde.” Ibid., 26.

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149. “Tirer du nombre des langues barbares cette langue que nous parlons.” PellissonFontanier, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie Française, 21. 150. “Les étrangers . . . ont méprisée jusqu’ici,” “les livres qui suivront . . . seront en crédit à perpétuité.” Ibid., 468. 151. “Les grandes qualités de François I rendirent célèbre la langue française lorsqu’elle était encore à demi barbare.” Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 37. 152. “Le langage de ce siècle-là n’était qu’une pure barbarie, aussi bien que celui des siècles suivants.” Ibid. 153. “Outre que les Français étaient encore fort barbares, ils furent si occupés dans les guerres qu’ils entreprirent et dans celles qu’ils soutinrent qu’ils n’eurent pas le loisir de cultiver les sciences: ils songèrent plus à faire de belles actions que de beaux discours.” Ibid., 107–8. 154. “Ce monstre dura longtemps, la barbarie du langage ayant subsisté, avec celle des moeurs, pendant des siècles entiers.” Ibid., 107. 155. Charpentier, Défense, 374. 156. “Ces barbarismes se sont adoucis”; “reparé les vices de sa naissance.” Ibid. 157. “Dans son premier âge rude, grossier, sans ordre”; “Il ne sert de rien de luy reprocher les begayemens de son enfance, et de dire qu’elle n’a esté connue que sous le nom de langue latine rustique parmy ceux qui l’ont vu naistre.” Ibid., 374. 158. “Cette langue qui a esté jugée si belle par les autres nations n’a jamais esté en un si haut degré de perfection qu’elle l’est présentement, et s’il faut avouer après cela qu’elle soit inférieure à la romaine, je ne remarque point que ce soit de si loin qu’on se le pourroit imaginer.” Ibid., 375. 159. See Pellisson-Fontanier, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie Française, vol. 1, 405. 160. “Laissez votre vocabulaire / Abandonnez votre grammaire / N’innovez rien, ne faites rien / En la langue, et vous ferez bien.” Ibid., 488.

chapter 7. imitation and the “classical” path 1. For a different challenge to the term “classical,” see Stanton, “Classicism (Re)Constructed: Notes on the Mythology of Literary History.” 2. “Pour l’esprit des Sauvages, il est de bonne trempe. Je crois que les âmes sont toutes de meme estoc et qu’elles ne diffèrent point substantiellement; c’est pourquoi ces barbares ayant un corps bien fait, et les organes bien rangés et bien disposés, leur esprit doit opérer avec facilité.” JR, VI: 229. 3. “Leur couleur naturelle est comme celle de ces gueux de France qui son demi rostis au Soleil, et je ne doute point que les Sauvages ne fussent très blancs s’ils estoient bien couverts.” Ibid., V: 23. 4. “A la vérité ils sont tous de couleur brune que nous disons olivatre à laquelle ils se plaisent: mais je crois que cette couleur ne procède pas tant par la chaleur de ce climat

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comme par les huiles et peintures qu’ils se mettent ordinairement par tout le corps. Car quand ils naissent (ainsi que j’ai vu plusieurs fois) ils sont aussi blancs que les petits enfants de France. Mais ils ont cette coutume un ou deux jours après qu’ils sont nés de les frotter par tout le corps d’huile et de Roucou, qui est une peinture rouge, ce que reiterant par plusieurs et divers jours, en peu de temps ces petits enfants deviennent tout basannés, sans avoir été beaucoup au Soleil.” D’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 267. 5. Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 1, 9. 6. “Il me semble que Ciceron dit qu’autrefois toutes les nations ont este vagabondes.” JR, V: 194. 7. “Et en cela n’avons dequoy nous mocquer d’eux, par ce que nos vieux peres Gaullois en faisoient de meme, et dinoient aussi sur des peaux de chiens et de loups, si Diodore et Strabon disent vray.” Ibid., I: 84. 8. “Qu’on ne s’étonne point de ces barbaries, avant que la foy fut receue en Allegmagne, en Espagne, en Angleterre, ces peuples n’estoient pas plus polis. L’esprit ne manque pas aux Sauvages de Canada, si bien l’éducation et l’instruction.” Ibid., V: 31. 9. Aubert, “The Blood of France.” 10. Bull Inter Caetera, 77–78. 11. Pagden, Lords of All the World, 33; and Zeller, “Les rois de France candidats à l’empire.” 12. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession. 13. For the Spanish use of this myth, see Gliozzi, Adam et le nouveau monde, 23–26. 14. Japheth was “le prince du monde entier.” He had dominion over Sem and Asia “de telle façon que le droit de la posséder vient effectivement à Japeth.” In relation to Sem, Japheth was “comme le maitre du domaine et le propriétaire vis-à-vis du fermier.” Postel, Cosmographicae, 19, 15, cited in Gliozzi, Adam et le nouveau monde, 31. 15. “L’origine des peuples [amérindiens] . . . nous sont apparentés”; “les moyens de pouvoir s’entendre avec eux et de vivre en paix . . . la paix universelle.” The goal “pour lequel le monde a été fait, c’est-à-dire la paix universelle.” Quoted in Gliozzi, Adam et le nouveau monde, 31. Postel also claimed: “Seu, de varia et potissimum orbi latino ad hanc diem incognita, aut inconsiderata historia, quum totius Orientis, tuum maxime Tartarorum, Persarum, Turcarum et omnimum Abrahami et Noachi alumnorum origines, et mysteria Brachmanum retegente: Quod ad gentium, literarumque quid.Utuntur, rationes attinet.” Postel, De originibus, 8. Postel developed this notion more systematically eight years later in his Cosmographicae. 16. Brazeau, Writing a New France, 1604−32, 69−95. 17. “Surnommé le Gaulois pour ce qu’au déluge du monde s’étant garanti des eaux, il en garantit aussi la race des hommes, et repeupla la terre.” Lescarbot, Histoire de la NouvelleFrance, ed, Grant, I.2.11. All the references to and translations of this text are from this edition. 18. “Une obscure connaissance du déluge.” Ibid. 19. “Quel empêchement y a-t-il de croire que Noé ayant vécu trois cent cinquante ans

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après le Déluge, n’a lui-même eu le soin et pris la peine de peupler, ou plutôt repeupler ces pays-là [du Nouveau Monde].” Ibid. 20. “Nous croyons qu’il a eu un déluge qui fit périr les mortels de dessus la terre pour leurs meschancetez: Et que Dieu conserva seulement un Père et une Mère dont tous les humains sont venus. Vous et nous n’estions lors qu’un peuple.” Mercure François, vol. 3, 172. 21. “L’esperance . . . que nos enfants apprendront la loy de Dieu et vos arts et sciences, nous faict croire qu’à l’avenir nous ne serons qu’un peuple et que l’on ne nous tiendra que pour François.” Ibid. 22. “Se trouvans nuds, ils auroient esté contraints de vivre de chasse & de pecherie, & se couurir des peaux des animaux qu’ils auroient tués, & auroient multiplié & rempli cette terre tellement quellement . . . si bien qu’ores qu’auparavant ils eussent quelque connoissance de Dieu, cela peu à peu s’est évanoui, faute d’instructeurs.” Ibid., vol. 1, 236. 23. “Voilà comme les peuples Sauvages peuvent avoir multipliés. Et qui eût laissé là perpetuellement ces hommes avec nombre de femmes, ilz fussent (ou leurs enfans) devenuz semblables aux peuples de la Nouvelle-France, et eussent peu à peu perdu la connaissance de Dieu.” Ibid., vol. 1, 162. 24. See Ellingson, Myth of the Noble Savage, 1–34. 25. See Bernhardt, Hobbes, 88, 112. 26. Ashcraft, “Leviathan Triumphant.”: See also Aravamudan, “Hobbes and America.” 27. Bishop Bramhall, quoted in ibid., 151. 28. Ibid., passim. 29. As Robert Boyle explained in his attacks at the time, “the Leviathan, and some other of his writings, made too great an impression upon divers persons.” Quoted in ibid., 142. Ashcraft cites as his source Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, 59. 30. Hobbes, Leviathan, 101. 31. Hobbes, De Cive, 29, quoted in Ashcraft, “Leviathan Triumphant,” 154. 32. Quoted in Ashcraft, Ibid., 151. 33. Columbus, “Journal,” in Four Voyages to the New World, 24, 33, 58. 34. Vespucci, Letters from a New World, 7. For a good general overview of this history, see Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 10–83. 35. Atkinson, Les relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l’évolution des idées. 36. Thevet accompanied both texts with numerous engravings detailing feasts of humans eating the body parts of their enemies. For example, the engraving “Comme les sauvages rôtissent leurs ennemis” vividly presented legs and arms roasting on a spit—with decapitated heads waiting their turn in the background. See Lestringant, “Les représentations du sauvage.” 37. Quoted in Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 30. 38. Quoted in Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 52. For a discussion of this negative form of description, see Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 196–201. 39. See d’Avity, Les estats, empires et principautez du monde, 261, quoted in Hogden, Early Anthropology, 201. 40. Louis Le Roy, quoted in Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 199.

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41. Montaigne, “On Cannibals.” 42. Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 1, 31–22. 43. Quoted in Ashcraft, “Leviathan Triumphant,” 151. 44. Hobbes, Leviathan, 99. 45. Hobbes articulated this dimension in a different context from the relations de voyage. Writing at the time of the English civil war, Hobbes wanted to guard against future civil strife. To this end, he sought to strengthen the commonwealth by motivating individuals to abandon their personal sovereignty and submit to an alien authority, the state. His strategy went in for “shock therapy,” as William Connolly put it, blasting currents of fear into his readers’ hearts, portraying humans as more akin to animals than civilized beings. (See Hobbes, Leviathan, I, chap. 13.) With the fear of an anarchic “war of all against all,” humans would seek protection in civil society and a common form of sovereignty. See Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, 29. 46. Searles, introduction to Les sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid, 2. 47. See Merlin, Public et littérature en France, 153–93. Joan DeJean made a similar argument with respect to the post-1687 phase of this quarrel in Ancients Against Moderns. 48. “On ne se pouvait lasser de la voir (la pièce), on n’entendait autre chose dans les compagnies, chacun en savait quelque partie par coeur, on la faisait apprendre aux enfants et, en quelques endroits de la France, il était passé en proverbe de dire: Cela est beau comme le Cid.” Pellisson-Fontanier, Relation contenant l’histoire de l’Académie Française, vol. 1, 86. 49. “La foule a été si grande à nos portes et notre lieu s’est trouvé si petit, que les recoins du théâtre qui servaient les autres fois comme de niche aux pages, ont été des places de faveur pour les cordons bleus et la scène y a été d’ordinaire parée de croix de chevaliers de l’ordre.” Mondory to Balzac, 18 January 1637, quoted in Merlin, Public et littérature, 175. 50. “Tant si elle [la pièce] avait plu, que si en effet elle avait dû plaire.” Sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid in Gasté, ed., La querelle du Cid, 359. 51. “Comme si l’autheur du Cid eust introduict sur le theatre le parler Toupinamboux ou celuy du bas breton.” Scudéry, Observations sur les sentiments de l’Académie Française, quoted in Civardi, ed., La querelle du Cid, 1064. 52. Merlin has observed that the use of the term “people” in this context “renvoie au populum, non à la plebs.” Merlin, Public et littérature, 180. It is borrowed from Roman history implicitly referring to the adage, vox populi, vox dei. 53. “N’[ont] presque d’âme que celle des bestes.” “Ceux qui regardent toutes choses d’un œil . . . barbare.” Sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid in Gasté, ed., 360. My emphasis. 54. “La voix du peuple,” “l’opinion d’un Monstre qui n’a point [de jugement],” “ceux des animaux sauvages.” “Réponse de M. de Scudéry à M. de Balzac,” in Gasté, ed., La querelle du Cid, 461–62. 55. Scudéry, Observations sur le Cid, in Gasté, ed. La querelle du Cid, 71. 56. “Nous seuls, les derniers des barbares.” Chapelain, “Lettre sur la règle des vingtquatre heures,” 126. 57. Pavel, L’art de l’éloignement. See also Brody, “What Was French Classicism?”

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58. Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France, 17–33. 59. “La qualité d’un homme barbare . . . serait naturelle aux hommes, si . . . la bonne éducation n’en étaient le correctif.” The same was true of language. “Un Orateur ne doit point hasarder un mot barbare . . . sans quelque correctif ou adoucissement.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “correctif.” 60. Quoted in Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, 90. 61. “Un père est barbare, quand il n’a point de tendresse pour ses enfants.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “barbare.” 62. “Des sentiments . . . cruels et barbares, . . . qui me font horreur.” Scudéry, Observations sur le Cid, 82. 63. “Elle lui dit cent choses dignes d’une prostituée.” Ibid., 94. 64. “L’éclat du théatre.” Ibid. For an interesting discussion of the cabinet’s importance, Stefanovska, “Strolling Through the Galleries.” 65. “Dans un cabinet où le silence, la solitude et le loisir vous permettront d’examiner plus exactement ce criminel [Rodrigue].” Quoted in Merlin, Public et littérature, 173. 66. “Elle m’a ravi sur le papier qui est la pierre de touche de ces sortes de beauté, et . . . je lui ai assigné dans mon cabinet le rang qu’elle tenait autrefois dans le monde.” Quoted in Ibid., 174. 67. “Les plus dignes cabinets de Paris.” Mairet, Epître familière, quoted in Merlin, Public et littérature, 174. 68. “Rien n’a este imaginé tout d’un coup parfaitement, et que les plus saines opinions n’ont jamais esté les premières.” Searles, ed., Sentiments de l’Académie, 17, rejected Version A. 69. “Quoy qu’Aristote assure que les plus belles choses et les meilleures, ont esté crées les premières, il n’en est pas ainsi de ses productions.” “Réponse de Monsieur de Scudéry,” in Gasté, ed., La querelle du Cid, 458. 70. “La Nature . . . est sans doute merveilleuse, mais il faut que l’Art le soit encore davantage, puisqu’il la corrige.” Ibid., 460. 71. “L’essence du classicisme est de venir après. L’ordre suppose un certain désordre qu’il vient réduire. La composition, qui est artifice, succède à quelque chaos primitif d’intuitions et de développements naturels.” Valéry, “Situation de Baudelaire,” vol. 1, 604. 72. See Melzer, Discourses of the Fall. 73. “Enrichir notre Langue des ornements qui luy manquent.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie Française, 15. 74. “Font gloire de . . . passer leur rudesse et leur barbarie, pour des beautez viriles et des graces naturelles.” Ibid., 38. 75. “Méritent de n’estre couverts que de peaux d’animaux, au lieu d’estre habillez d’or et de soye, et de n’habiter que des forests et des cabanes, au lieu des Villes et des maisons, qui sont ainsi aveuglement amoureux de cette première simplicité de la Nature.” Ibid. 76. “C’est en effet par la parolle que Dieu a fait la plus claire distinction qui se voye entre la nature des hommes et celle des bestes; car apres nous avoir donné la Raison et esclairé nos ames des rayons de sa Divinité. Cette Raison paroistroit beaucoup moins qu’elle

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ne fait, et ne nous serviroit pas à tant d’usages qu’elle nous sert, s’il ne nous eust donné la faculté d’exprimer nos pensées. Si donc cette partie nous est si essentielle, et si c’est par là que certains hommes semblent quelquefois estre plus eslevez par-dessus les autres hommes, que ceux-cy ne le sont par-dessus le reste des animaux, quels soins peuvent estre mieux employez qu’à la mettre à sa perfection?” Ibid., 52. 77. Carron, “Imitation and Intertextuality in the Renaissance.” 78. “Or sommes nous, la grace à Dieu, par beaucoup de perilz et de flotz etrangers, renduz au port à seureté. Nous avons echappé du millieu des Grecz, et par les scadrons Romains penetré jusques au sein de la tant désirée France. La donq, Francoys, marchez couraigeusement vers cete superbe cité Romaine: et des serves depouilles d’elle (comme vous avez fait plus d’une fois) ornez voz temples et autelz. . . . Donnez en cete Grece menteresse, et y semez encor un coup la fameuse nation des Gallogrecz.” Du Bellay, Défense et illustration de la langue française, ed. Helgerson, II, conclusion, 412. All the references and most of the translations for this text come from this edition. 79. “Notre langue ne se pique point d’inventer des mots: c’est une peine, plustôt qu’un honneur, qu’elle laisse volontiers aux autres, chez qui elle aime beaucoup mieux les aller choisir pour après les façonner à son usage.” Louis Le Laboureur, Avantages de la langue françoise sur la langue latine, quoted in Rickard, The French Language in the Seventeenth Century, 353. 80. “Ne nous appartiennent point en propre, et que nous les avons été puiser en des sources étrangères, et particulièrement dans le domaine des Latins.” Ibid., 354. 81. “Elle [la langue] s’en est emparée aussitôt, et se les est si bien appropriez qu’ils paroissent n’avoir été inventez par les autres nations que pour venir apres luy offrir leur service.” Ibid. 82. “Dans nos expéditions militaires, soit en Italie, soit en Espagne, soit en Allemagne et en Grèce, dans l’Asie et dans l’Afrique. Nous en sommes revenus plus chargez de gloire que de dépouilles; et avec tout l’honneur que nous avons rapporté de ces courses, il nous en est demeuré force termes et force phrases que nous avons conservez depuis, comme des marques parlantes de nos anciennes victoires.” Ibid. 83. “Fussent-ils [les mots] originaires d’Athènes ou de Rome, de Madrid ou de Florence, ils ont parmy nous les mêmes privileges que s’ils etoient nez dans le Louvre. La France les traitte comme ses propres enfans, et n’en fait pas de distinction.” Ibid., 353. 84. “Comme l’une n’est riche que des despouilles de l’autre, qui nous empesche mesme de nous les mettre toutes deux en proye, et de transférer à nostre usage tous les thresors qui nous sont ouverts dans leurs Ecrits?” Faret, Projet de l’Académie Française, 42. My emphasis. 85. “C’est une chose fort glorieuse à notre nation . . . que la langue française soit en vogue dans la capitale des Pays-Bas avant que la domination française y soit établie. La langue latine a suivi les conquêtes des Romains; mais je ne vois pas qu’elle les ait jamais précédées. Les nations que ces conquérants avaient vaincues apprenaient le latin malgré elles; au lieu que les peuples qui ne sont pas encore soumis à la France apprennent volontairement le français. La gloire du Roi y attribue peut-être autant que celle de ses prédécesseurs.” Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 15. My emphasis.

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86. “Presque aussitôt que la sienne, comme par un instinct secret qui l’avertit malgré lui qu’il doit un jour obéir au Roi de France, comme à son légitime maître.” Ibid. 87. “Néglig[ent] tout à fait leur langue naturelle, et à se faire honneur de ne l’avoir jamais apprise.” Ibid. 88. “Toutes les langues fussent réduites à une seule.” Ibid., 35. 89. “Tous les peuples s’entendissent comme nous nous entendons.” Ibid., 36. 90. “Tous les étrangers qui ont de l’esprit se piquent de savoir le français.” “Il n’y a guère de pays dans l’Europe où l’on n’entende le Français.” “C’est lui donner des bornes trop étroites que de la renfermer dans l’Europe; elle a cours parmi les sauvages de l’Amérique et parmi les nations de l’Asie les plus civilisées.” Ibid., 33. 91. “Les Persans étudient le Français avec un ardeur incroyable. Je ne sais même si les Chinois et les Japonais ne l’étudient pas aussi, depuis qu’il y a des Français parmi eux.” “Si la langue Française n’est pas encore la langue de tous les peuples du monde, il me semble qu’elle mérite de l’être.” Ibid., 38. 92. “Sommes nous donques moindres que les Grecz ou Romains, qui faisons si peu de cas de la nostre. . . .Pourquoy donques sommes nous si grand admirateurs d’autruy? Pourquoi sommes nous tant iniques à nous mesmes? Pourquoy mandions nous les Langues etrangères, comme si nous avions honte d’user de la nostre?” Du Bellay, Défense, II, xii, 406. 93. “Nous désirons qu’elle acquiere assez de vigueur, pour se pouvoir un jour esgaler à la magnificence des Anciennes. Elle n’est pas incapable, comme quelques-uns s’imaginent, d’atteindre à la hauteur d’une si pénible entreprise.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie Française, 42. My emphasis. 94. “Et la merveille ne serait pas plus grande de voir qu’elle [la langue Française] eust succedé à la Latine.” Ibid. 95. “Qui nous empesche meme de nous les mettre toutes deux en proye.” Ibid.

chapter 8. using the sauvage as a lever to decolonize france from the ancients 1. McGowan, ed., L’Entrée de Henri II à Rouen 1550. “Cinquante naturelz sauvages.” My discussion of this festival is indebted to Wintroub, A Savage Mirror. See also Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise.” 2. There were several Renaissance accounts of this festival. See also C’est la déduction du somptueux ordre.For another anonymous account of this festival, see Beaucousin, ed., L’entrée du roy. 3. “Sans aucunement couvrir la partie que nature commande.” C’est la déduction, fol. K iiii(r). Cited in Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise,” 492. 4. “Faconnez et equipez, en la mode des sauvages de l’Amérique.” Ibid. 5. “Ayant frequenté le pays, parloit autant bien le langage, et exprimoit . . . les gestes et façons de faire des sauvages, comme s’ilz fussent natifz du mesmes pays.” Ibid.

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6. See Calendar of State Papers (Spanish), 1550–52, vol. I, 182, cited in Wintroub, A Savage Mirror, 487. 7. C’est la déduction, fol. K iiii (r), cited in Wintroub, A Savage Mirror, 487. 8. For a discussion of the importance of the scientific and technological advances in the Quarrel, see Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts; Pagden, European Encounters with the New World. 9. Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise,”41−86. See also Wintroub, A Savage Mirror. 10. France’s old feudal elite constructed the nation’s past differently and had a diverging understanding of “barbarism,” “civilization,” and “imitation,” but an exploration of these understandings is beyond this book’s scope. See Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise,” for the alternative narratives. 11. Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise.” See also Wintroub, The Savage Mirror. 12. Cartier, Voyages au Canada, 49–69. 13. Cited in Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise,” 26–28. See also Hemming, Red Gold, 8. Also Lestinguant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage, 29. See Benedict, Rouen During the Wars of Religion, 18–20. See also Mollat, Le commerce maritime normand à la fin du moyen âge. 14. Cited in Wintroub, “To Triumph in Paradise,” 80. See also Guénin, Ango et ses pilotes, 43–44. 15. Bull Inter Caetera, 77–78. 16. This festival also featured another set of sauvages, the Tabagerres, who were hostile and viscious. They were the Portuguese allies. 17. “Rendre les hommes les maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.” Descartes, Discours de la nature, 128. 18. See Grafton, New World, Ancient Texts. 19. “Une plante sauvaige,” “en celui mesmes desert ou elle avoit commencé à naitre,” “sans jamais l’arrouser, la tailler, ny defendre des ronces et epines qui luy faisoint umbre, l’ont laissée envieillir et quasi mourir.” Du Bellay, La Défense, ed. Helgerson, I.iii.329. All the references to and most of the translations for this text are from this edition. 20. See Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By. See also Derrida, La mythologie blanche, and Foucault, Les mots et les choses. 21. acre: “[Ce] qui est opposé à cultivé.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel. 22. sauvage: “Se dit aussi à l’égard des plantes & des arbres, & désigne celles qui croissent naturellement dans les bois, ou à la campagne, par opposition à celles qui sont dans les jardins entées & cultivées. . . . Un fruit a un goust sauvage, quand il est revesche & acre, quand il n’a pas été enté pour le rendre doux. On dit aussi un pays sauvage, quand il est montueux, desert, stérile, & point cultivé.” Ibid. 23. sauvage: “Il n’y a guere de beste si sauvage, qu’on n’apprivoise avec de l’adresse & de la patience, quand on les esleve de jeunesse.” Ibid. 24. “Non pour le default de la nature d’elle,” “ne l’ont cultivée à suffisance.” Du Bellay, La Défense, I.iii.329.

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25. “Si la Nature (dont quelque personnaige de grand’ renommée non sans rayson a douté si on la devoit appeller mere ou maratre).” Ibid., I.i.323. 26. See Joan DeJean’s discussion of “culture” in Ancients Against Moderns. She argues that culture did not apply to humans in the seventeenth century. However, Fontenelle used it in that way in his Digression (1688). 27. “Plus diligens à la culture de leurs langues que nous à celle de la nostre.” Du Bellay, La Défense, I.iii.329. 28. “Infertile,” “l’ignorance de notz majeurs.” Ibid., I.iii.327. 29. “Au moyen de l’industrie et diligence des cultiveurs.” Ibid., I.iv.331. 30. “De bons agriculteurs.” Ibid., I.iii.329. 31. “L’ont premièrement transmuée d’un lieu sauvaige en un domestique : puis affin que plus tost et mieux elle peust fructifier, coupant à l’entour les inutiles rameaux, l’ont pour échange d’iceux restaurée de rameaux francz et domestiques, magistralement tirez de la langue Greque, les quelz soudainement se sont si bien entez et faiz semblables à leur tronc, que desormais n’apparoissent plus adoptifz, mais naturelz.” Ibid. 32. “Sont nées en la langue Latine ces fleurs, et ces fruictz colorez de cete grande eloquence.” Ibid. 33. “Nostre langue, qui commence encores à fleurir sans fructifier, ou plus tost, comme une plante et vergette, n’a point encores fleury.” Ibid. 34. “La Langue Françoyse qui commence encor’ à jeter ses racines, sortira de terre, et s’elevera en telle hauteur et grosseur, qu’elle se poura egaler aux mesmes Grecz et Romains, produysant comme eux des Homeres, Demosthenes, Virgiles et Cicerons.” Ibid. 35. “Elles viennent toutes d’une mesme source et origine.” Du Bellay also emphasized that “Ainsi donques toutes les choses que la Nature a crées, tous les ars et sciences en toutes les quartre parties du monde, sont chacune endroict soy une mesme chose: mais pour ce que les hommes sont de divers vouloir, ilz en parlent et ecrivent diversement.” “And therefore all things Nature has created, all the arts and learned disciplines in the four quarters of the world, are in themselves the same, but since men differ in their desires, they speak and write differently.” Ibid., I.i.323. 36. “Mais qui voudroit dire que la Greque et Romaine eussent tousjours eté en l’excellence qu’on les a vues du tens d’Homere et de Demosthene, de Virgile et de Ciceron? Et si ces aucteurs eussent jugé que jamais, pour quelque diligence et culture qu’on y eust peu faire, elles n’eussent sceu produyre plus grand fruict, se feussent ilz tant eforcez de les mettre au point où nous les voyons maintenant?” Ibid., I.iii.327−29. 37. “Pourquoy doncques ont voyaigé les anciens Grecz par tant de paiz et dangers, les uns aux Indes, pour vois les gymnosophistes, les autres en Egypte, pour emprunter de ces vieux prestres et prophetes ces grandes richesse, dont la Grece est maintenant si superbe?” Ibid., I.x.353. 38. For a developed discussion of the notion of progress, see Nisbet, The History of the Idea of Progress. 39. “Leur âme est un sol très bon de la nature, mais chargé de toutes les malices qu’une terre délaissée depuis la naissance du monde peut porter.” JR, VI: 228.

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40. “Il y a du plaisir . . . de les cultiver pour recevoir la semence du Christianisme.” Ibid., 152. 41. “La semence de l’Evangile commence à germer dans les coeurs de ces Barbares.” Ibid., IX : 98. 42. “Un homme vivant dans les solitudes . . . lieux déserts, incultes, stériles et inhabitez . . . sauvage . . . plustost en beste qu’en hommes.” Dictionnaire de L’Académie Française, s.v. “sauvage.” 43. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 109−20. 44. Ibid. 140−55. 45. Plato, The Republic, 415a, 94. 46. “D’une argile plus fine [et] mieux preparé que nos philosophes.” Fontenelle, Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, 31–32. 47. “Avaient plus d’esprit que nous,” “les cerveaux de ce temps-là étaient mieux disposés, formés de fibres plus fermes ou plus délicates, remplis de plus d’esprits animaux,” “l’on n’a d’esprit qu’autant qu’on . . . admire [les Anciens] ne peuvent être égalés dans ces derniers siècles.” Ibid., 31. 48. “Les premiers hommes.” Ibid. 49. “Ils étaient avant nous.” Ibid. 50. “Les premiers siècles du monde.” Fontenelle, “De l’origine des fables,” vol. 3, 188. 51. “J’aimerais autant qu’on les vantât sur ce qu’ils ont bu les premiers l’eau de nos rivières, et que l’on nous insultât sur ce que nous ne buvons plus que leurs restes.” Ibid., 34–35. 52. “L’enfance du monde.” Ibid., 35. 53. “Une conformité étonnante entre les Fables des Américains et celles des Grecs.” Fontenelle, “De l’origine des fables,” vol. 3, 197. 54. “Un amas de chimères, de rêveries et d’absurdités.” Ibid. 55. “Cruels, bizarres, injustes, ignorans.” Ibid. 56. “La force du corps.” Ibid. 57. Ibid., 187–97. 58. “Ce qui montre que les Grecs furent pendant un temps des Sauvages aussi bien que les Américains, et qu’ils furent tirés de la barbarie par les mêmes moyens.” Ibid., 197. 59. “Un Peuple nouveau, [ils] ne pensèrent point plus raisonnablement que les Barbares de l’Amérique, qui étoient, selon toutes les apparences, un Peuple assez nouveau lorsqu’ils furent découverts par les Espagnols.” Ibid., 198. 60. “Figurons nous les Cafres, les Lappons ou les Iroquois.” “La barbarie [qui] durent être à un excès que nous ne sommes presque plus en état de nous représenter.” Ibid., 187. 61. “Ont du parvenir à quelque degré de connoissance et politesse que les premiers hommes n’avoient pas.” Ibid. 62. “Nous expliquons les choses inconnues de la nature par celles que nous avons devant les yeux.” Ibid., 189. 63. “L’art et la culture peuvent beaucoup plus sur les cerveaux que sur la terre, qui

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est d’une matière plus dure et plus intraitable.” Fontenelle, Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, 32–33. 64. “Il y a plus de diversité entre les esprits qu’entre les visages,” “Ainsi les esprits, qui naturellement différaient autant que les visages, viennent à ne différer plus tant.” Ibid., 33. 65. “La difference des climats ne doit être compté pour rien, pourvu que les esprits soient d’ailleurs cultivés.” Ibid. 66. “Ainsi les pensées d’un pays se transportent plus aisément dans un autre que ses plantes, et nous n’aurions pas tant de peine à prendre dans nos ouvrages le génie italien, qu’à éléver des orangers.” Ibid., 32. 67. “Toutes les différences, quelles qu’elles soient, doivent être causées par des circonstances étrangères, telles que sont le temps, le gouvernement, l’état des affaires générales.” Ibid., 34. 68. “Les beaux esprits de ces temps-là, . . . pourront être des Américains.” Ibid. 69. “L’âge de virilité où [la France] raisonne avec plus de force, et a plus de lumières que jamais.” Ibid., 43. 70. “L’on peut espérer de voir jamais de grands auteurs lapons ou nègres.” Ibid., 33. 71. “Les Grecs et les Romains ont inventé tous les arts et toutes les sciences.” Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts, 394. 72. “Il me semble que jusqu’à présent vous ne m’avez pas trop bien prouvé les avantages de l’Europe sur l’Amerique.” Ibid., 395. 73. “Qui osteroit à l’Europe ses formalitez, la rendroit bien semblable à l’Amérique.” Ibid., 396. 74. “[Les] Américains seroient venus à la fin à penser aussi raisonnablement que les Grecs, si on leur en avoit laissé le loisir.” Fontenelle, “De l’origine des fables,” vol. 3, 198. 75. “Mettez un Peuple nouveau sous le pôle, ses premières histoire seront des Fables.” Ibid., 197. 76. “La même ignorance a produit à peu-près les mêmes effets chez tous les peuples.” Ibid., 198. 77. “Les derniers physiciens ou mathématiciens devront naturellement être les plus habiles.” Fontenelle, Digression, 34. 78. “Mon cher Adam, mon vieux et triste père,/Je crois te voir en un recoin d’Eden/ Grossièrement forger le genre humain/En tourmentant [1736: en secouant] madame Eve, ma mère,/Deux singes verts, deux chèvre-pieds fourchus/Sont moins hideux au fond de la feuillée./Par le soleil votre face hâlée,/Vos bras velus, votre main écaillée, /Vos ongles longs, crasseux, noirs et crochus,/Votre peau bise, endurcie et brulée,/Sont les attraits, sont les charmes flatteurs/Dont l’assemblage allume vos ardeurs.” Voltaire, Mélanges, 1368. This text comes from the original version, which Voltaire subsequently revised because he was attacked so strongly. 79. “L’égalité naturelle qui est entre les anciens et nous.” Fontenelle, Digression, 34. 80. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 140.

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conclusion. the legacy of the quarrel 1. Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 9. 2. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire. 3. Charles-Robert Ageron wrote an article on the Colonial Exposition of 1931. However, Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, the editors of La fracture coloniale, 15, strongly criticized its analysis and its disturbing conclusions. 4. Citron, “L’impossible révision de l’histoire de France,” 42–52. 5. Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale. 6. Ibid., 33–42. 7. “Les programmes de recherche universitaire accordent à l’histoire de la présence française outre-mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord, la place qu’elle mérite.” 8. “Les programmes scolaires reconnaissent en particulier le rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord.” 9. See C. Liauzu et al., “Non, à l’enseignement d’une histoire officielle,” Le Monde, 25 March 2005. 10. “Impose un mensonge officiel sur des crimes, sur des massacres allant parfois jusqu’au génocide, sur l’esclavage, sur le racisme hérité de ce passé.” Quoted in Pierre Boilly, “Loi du 23 février, 2005, colonisation, indigènes, victimisations,” Politique africaine, 132. 11. See Culture Sud, April–June 2007. Blanchard and Bancel, eds., Culture postcoloniale. See also Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale; Gallo, Fier d’être Français; Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale; Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence; Paoli, “Nous ne sommes pas coupables”; Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire; and Stora, La guerre des mémoires. 12. “Durant sa présence en Algérie, au Maroc, en Tunisie ainsi que dans les territoires anciennement placés sous sa souveraineté, les apports de la France ont été multiples dans les domaines scientifiques, techniques, administratifs, culturels et aussi linguistiques. Grâce [aux Français], . . . ces pays ont pu se développer socialement et économiquement; ils ont ainsi contribué fortement au rayonnement de la France dans le monde. Reconnaître l’oeuvre positive de nos compatriotes sur ces territoires est un devoir pour l’Etat français,” Projet de loi #1499, proposed March 2004; cited in Boilley, “Loi du 23 février 2005, colonisation, indigènes, victimisations,” 133. 13. Bancel, Blanchard, and Vergès, La république coloniale. 14. “Quand nous prenons possession d’un pays. . . . Que là enfin où la France est etablie, on l’aime, que là ou elle n’a fait que passer, on la regrette; que partout ou sa lumière resplendit, elle est bienfaisante; que là ou elle ne brille plus, elle a laissé derrière elle un long et doux crépuscule où les regards et les coeurs restent attachés,” cited in Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale, 39. 15. “En Gaule, les Romains furent à peu près ce que les Français ont fait dans leurs colonies d’Algérie et du Tonkin, ce qu’ils font maintenant au Maroc. Ils construisirent de belles routes bien pavées pour permettre aux soldats et aux marchands de circuler. . . . Ils

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construisirent des villes comme Nîmes et Lyons. Quelle différence entre le misérable village des Gaulois et ces villes. . . . Les Gaulois apprirent le latin, d’où vient la langue française que vous parlez. Ils n’étaient plus une nation indépendante, mais ils trouvèrent qu’ils étaient plus heureux qu’autrefois. On dit que les Romains ont apporté la civilisation à la Gaule.” Cited in Citron, “De la cohérence historiographique au bric à brac,” 405. 16. See Bancel, Blanchard, and Vergès, La république coloniale. 17. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 107. 18. “Il semble ils [les Romains] ne n’y soient engagez que pour leur [les Gaules] dire des injures. Tantost ils les appellent les plus terribles et les plus impitoyables de tous les Barbares... des Monstres qui n’estoient nays que pour la désolation des Villes, et pour le malheur du Genre-humain.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie, 20. 19. “Avec toutes les plus belles couleurs de la Rhetorique.” Ibid. 20. Furetière, “Factum pour Messire Antoine Furetière, abbé de Chalivoy, contre quelques-uns de Messieurs de l’Académie Françoise,” in Recueil des Factums d’Antoine Furetière, 17. For a discussion of Furetière, see Melzer, “Le Nouveau Monde et la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes dans Le Furetière.” 21. Recueil des factums d’Antoine Furetière, 15. 22. “Racine n’a presque jamais peint que des Français, et que le siècle présent, même quand il a voulu peindre un autre siècle, et d’autres nations.” Fontenelle, “Parallèle de Corneille et de Racine,” in Reveries Diverses, 66. 23. “Les peuples de l’Amerique ne sont pas d’une autre nature que ceux de la France.” [Anonymous,] Nouvelles de l’Amérique, 5. 24. “Toutes les vérités ne sont pas bonnes pour le théatre. . . . Il y a des verités monstrueuses, ou qu’il faut supprimer pour le bien de la société, ou que si l’on ne peut les tenir cachées, il faut se contenter de remarquer comme des choses estranges.” “Or c’est principalement en ces occasions que le Poète doit préférer la Vraysemblance à la verité et qu’il doit plustost travailler sur une chose toute feinte, pourveu qu’elle soit conforme à la raison.” Les sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid, 32. 25. Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation.”

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index

academies and public cultural institutions of Louis XIV, 152–53 Aeneas, 6, 70 agricultural/evolutionary discourse: challenges to Greco-Roman metal metaphor and discourse of degeneration, 211; Du Bellay and, 204–8, 215; and firstness, 214–16, 218; Fontenelle’s minimization of French-Ancient differences, 214–16, 218; French language as “sauvage plant,” 204–5; metaphor of the sauvage, 203–9, 215, 218–19; new evolutionary model of Greco-Roman civilization, 207–8, 215; terms “culture” and “agriculture,” 156, 206 Alexander the Great, 231n4 Alexander VI, Pope, 177 anachronisms, 4; the Amerindian sauvages at the 1662 Carrousel Festival, 128; “assimilation,” 18–20, 89–90, 235n66; colonization of Gaul as “civilizing mission,” 46–47; and the moderns’ “new history,” 42; “postcolonial,” 4–5 Ancient Greece, 23 1n4; concept of the barbarian and outsiders, 68–70; Fontenelle and the Greeks as first sauvages, 212–17, 218; metal metaphor and concept of degeneration, 209–11; nature as degenerative and hierarchical, 39, 67–68, 209–11; thought structures, 67–70, 209–11 Ancient Greek language: Charpentier’s argument for the true universal language, 143; and Du Bellay’s evolutionary model of thought, 207–8; French elites’ definition of “barbarian” rooted in, 68; and French language, 34–35, 68, 143, 236n 12; and Greek idea of outsiders, 68–69; and humanitas, 138

307

“ancients”: and idealized Roman discourse of colonization, 50–52; and Romanized/ civilized Gauls, 31–32, 36–37, 46–53, 54; as term, 10, 34–35; winning the memory war over Gallic heritage, 36–37, 50–53, 54. See also Gauls, Romanized/civilized; Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns Ancient Rome, 5; code for multiple narratives, 7–8; colonization as “civilizing mission,” 46–50, 147–51, 227; colonizing strategies and blurring of “us-them” boundaries, 50–52, 54, 66–67; concept of “Romanization,” 50–52, 235n67; differentiating influences of Rome/Greece on France, 34–35; the Gallic Hercules, 57, 147–51, 227; the moderns’ “new history” as explanation of memory theft from Gauls, 44–46, 58–61; Quarrel’s anti-Roman battles, 6–10, 34, 38–46, 58–61; relationship to the Greeks as their own cultural liberators, 49–50, 70–71; serving to legitimate France’s assimilationist policy in New World, 17–18, 113, 114–15; “soft” mode of domination, 47, 149; spreading humanitas, 47; thought structures, 70–71; Trojan myth of descent, 6, 37–38, 70, 232n18, 232n22. See also Gauls, Romanized/civilized Ancient World, France’s colonial relationship to, 2–3, 4–11. See also France’s dominant cultural narrative; Gauls, precolonized; Gauls, Romanized/civilized; imitation of the Ancients; Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns Annuae Litterae Societatis Jesu, 83 Apostolides, Jean-Marie, 127 Aristotle, 141, 162, 190

308

index

art and imitation: and civilizing of the Amerindians, 162–65, 185; as distancing shield against regression into barbarism, 185–91 Ashcraft, Richard, 181–82 assimilation and France’s colonial stance toward Amerindians, 11–14, 91–121; as anachronistic term, 18–20, 89–90, 235n66; boundary dilemmas and identities, 26, 92–94, 102–11, 116–21, 156, 159–61, 174–80, 184, 185, 191; boundary-stretching, 102–3, 108, 115, 120, 156, 184; and Catholic universalism, 113–14; clash between the Crown and Jesuits over implementation, 108–9, 255n64; diminishing the significance of French-Amerindian differences, 94–101, 175–76; education and erosion of cultural boundaries, 109–11; and France’s Christian monotheism, 104; “frenchification,” 106–7, 158–59, 161; how the Crown defined “peoplehood” and integration process, 106–9; and imitation as voluntary subjection, 154–65; integrationist assimilation, 104–9, 116–21; intermarriage, 11–14, 101, 105–6, 111–12, 116–20; Jesuits and, 105–6, 108–9, 117– 18; legitimation by Rome’s civilizing mission, 17–18, 113, 114–15; motivations for colonial policy, 111–15, 119; “passing” as ideal kind of boundarycrossing, 97–101, 115, 120; and question of slavery in France, 97, 252n21; religious orders and integrationist assimilation, 105–6, 108–9, 254n47; religious orders and segregationist stances, 106, 108, 117–18, 254n48; reverse influences and risk of regression into barbarism, 115–18, 120–21, 133–34, 180–84; safeguarding France’s identity and purity, 159–61; and seduction, 157–58; significance of failure, 118–21; tasks of French culture, 119, 157–60; transformation of sauvages into civilized French Catholics, 94–102, 158–59. See also “us-them” boundaries Aubert, Guillaume, 16 Augustine, Saint, 64, 146 Augustus, 5, 127 Bacon, Francis, 35 Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 221; Les Paysans, 19

Bancel, Nicolas, 222 “barbarians”: and agricultural/evolutionary discourse, 205–6; Du Bellay’s definition, 68; French internalization of negative image of the Gauls, 56–58, 61–67; Furetière’s definition, 68–70, 89, 189, 205–6; Greco-Roman mythical construct, 62, 68–71, 87–88, 250n58; how French intellectuals redefined, 69–70; the language of the relations de voyage, 87–88, 249n56; nomadism and, 109–10, 164–65, 176, 255–56n71; as prototype of otherness, 88–89. See also sauvage Battle of the Inscriptions, 142–47 Beaune, Colette, 37, 232n22 Belmessous, Saliha, 14, 16 Bhabha, Homi K., 69, 154, 156 Blanchard, Pascal, 222, 223 Bloechl, Olivia, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 16 Bodin, Jean, 38, 42–43; La méthode de l’histoire, 38 Boileau, Nicolas, 31–32, 125–27, 129 Bouhours, Dominique, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 56, 64–66, 151–52, 170, 194–95, 244n35, 244n37, 264n71 Bouton, Jacques, relation on Martinique, 81 Brague, Rémi, 70 Brazeau, Brian, Writing a New France, 16 Britain and the New World: assimilation policies and mixed marriages, 103; references to colonial enterprises in British literature, 17; travel accounts, 76; using military force to meet agricultural needs, 112–13 Budé, Guillaume, 7, 42–43, 63 Cabot, John, 103 Caesar, Julius, 5, 43, 45, 47–48, 239n56 Le Carrousel festival (1662) and the “Battle of Nations,” 127–31 Cartier, Jacques, 11 Catholic Reformation, 78–79; early missions, 248n2 1; expansionist drive and France’s assimilationist policy in New World, 113–14; the relations de voyage and “pious propaganda,” 78–83, 154–55 Cave, Terence, 10, 33, 133 Celts, 35–36, 237n15. See also Gauls, precolonized Cerquiglini, Bernard, 65

inde x Champlain, Samuel de: and the Amerindians’ voluntary subjection, 155; and educational method of “exemplarity,” 110; and integrationist assimilation, 106–7, 119; and motivations for France’s assimilation policy, 85, 112, 114–15; relations de voyage, 80–81, 85, 155; Voyages, 1604–7, 85 Chapelain, Jean, 76–77, 187, 189 Charles II, King (England), 103 Charpentier, François, 142–44, 151; Défense de la langue française pour l’inscription de l’Arc de Triomphe, 142, 151, 170; De l’excellence de la langue française, 144 Châtellier, Louis, 78, 79 Chirac, Jacques, 223 Cicero, 1, 49–50, 113 Citron, Suzanne, 36–37, 222 Citton, Yves, 4; Lire, interpréter, actualiser, 4 classical path/ideal (second escape route from the colonial bind), 173–98, 200–20 1; and assimilationist ideology, 179, 184, 191; Bouhours and France’s superiority to Romans/Latin, 194–95; cultural evolutionary continuum leading from barbarism to civilization, 176; the erosion of civilization/barbarism boundaries (a “crisis of similarity”), 26, 174–80, 185, 191; Faret’s Projet de l’Académie, 193–94, 196; Hobbes’s model for the state of nature/ dangers of fluid “us-them” boundaries, 180–84, 188–89; ontological similarity between French and Amerindians, 175– 180; the Quarrel of the Cid at the French Academy, 185–91, 228; reversing the colonial/cultural hierarchy by reframing imitation as act of aggression, 191–98; the role of culture and art as distancing shield, 185–91; valuing a cultural secondarity over a natural firstness, 188– 90, 197–98, 200–201, 211–19 Code Michaud (1629), 139 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Postcolonial Middle Ages, 4 Colbert (Louis XIV’s minister), 12–13, 102, 104–5, 108–9, 112 Collège des Quatre Nations, 136–39, 170–71 “colonial bind”: Memmi on, 66, 219, 225; three escape routes from barbarism, 125–26, 134–5, 172; and using of former colonizers’ writing to understand the colonized, 9, 42

309

colonial fracture and dominant narrative of colonization as civilizing mission, 221–29; French Academy and, 225–28; new memory wars over French history and culture and narrative of colonization, 222–24, 240n69; scholars on, 222. See also France’s dominant cultural narrative Columbus, Christopher, 83–84, 177, 182 Company of New France (Company of the One Hundred Associates), 80, 107, 254n55 Conversion, and colonization 19, 158; conditions for, 79, 84, 107; and “one people” 107–8; stories about, 12, 157–164; universalist ideology 113–14, 197 Cordemoy, Géraud de, Histoire de la France, 137 Corneille: Le Cid, 185–91; Cinna, 152; and curriculum of French Jesuit schools, 140, Les sentiments de L’Académie sur le Cid, 186–7, 228. Council of Trent, 78 Counter-Reformation, 78. See also Catholic Reformation Courtenault, Marquis de, 92, 97 Coustel, Pierre, Règles de l’éducation des enfants, 145–46 Cramoisy, Sébastien, 83 Crinit, Petro, 42 Croiset, Jean, 141 Crusades of the Middle Ages, 79 cultural secondarity, 188–90, 197–98, 200– 201, 211–19 “culture,” 156–57; and “agriculture,” 156–57, 206; social practices and material objects, 157; tasks of French culture in the New World assimilation policy, 119, 157–65 Curtius, Ernest, 33 D’Abbeville, Claude: account of Tupinamba tribe boys brought to France, 91–102; Histoire de la mission des pères capucins and the Tupinambas, 80, 91–102; on skin color of Amerindians, 175 De Belges, Jean Lemaire, 7, 37–38; Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie, 37–38, 232n22 De Brébeuf, Jean, 81 De Caillières, François, L’Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes, 32

310

index

De Certeau, Michel, 55 defense, genre of the, 55–67; context of Catholic-Protestant controversy, 57–58; defense against regression into barbarism, 56–58, 61–67; defenses of the French language, 55–61, 64–66, 151–52, 168–70, 194–95; founding of the French Academy, 56, 59–61, 169; and Greco-Roman memory theft, 44–45, 58–61, 63; imitation and, 56; and Italian charges of French barbarism, 42, 62, 64, 238n38; Pasquier’s defense of the nation, 8–9, 41–42, 56; and problem of absence of Gallic written documents, 58–61; proposals to repair the French language, 13–14, 62–66, 226–27 DeJean, Joan, 33, 237n16 De Lancre, Pierre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, 77–78 De la Roche, Marquis, 179–80 De Léry, Jean, 11, 119–20 Denonville, Jacques-René de Brisay de, 117 Desan, Philippe, 8 Des Autelz, Guillaume, 7, 39; Réplique aux furieuses deffences de Louis Meigret, 39 Descartes, René, 13, 35, 141; Discours de la méthode, 77, 203 difference/similarity: and agricultural/ evolutionary discourse, 214–16, 218; and assimilation policies, 94–101, 175–76, 191; erosion of boundaries and “crisis of similarity,” 26, 174–80, 185, 191; French and Amerindians, 94–101, 175–76, 185, 191; French and the Ancients, 132–34, 203–9, 211–18; the universal other, 88–89. See also “us-them” boundaries Diodorus, 1–2, 42, 23 1n4, 237n15 Dobie, Madeleine, 86 Dolet, Etienne, La Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en une autre, 63 Dompnier, Bernard, 79–80, 236n73 Druids (Gallic priests), 1, 40, 44, 239–40n56 Du Bellay, Guillaume, 7, 38–39; Epitomé des antiquités des Gaules et de la France, 38 Du Bellay, Joachim, 7; agricultural discourse and concept of sauvage, 204–8, 215; Défense et illustration de la langue française, 32–33, 44, 45, 55–56, 59, 63, 68, 168–69, 192, 195, 204–5; evolutionary model for history and Greco-Roman civilization, 207–8, 215; explanations for

absence of Gallic written documentation, 44, 45, 59; and Greek/barbarian binary opposition, 68–69; question of where to situate France on the road to civilization, 168–69; reframing imitation as act of aggression/theft, 192, 195; “sauvage plant” metaphor for, 204–5; on term “barbarian,” 68; and vernacular French language, 63, 168–69, 204–5 Dubois, Claude-Gilbert, 6–7 Dupleix, Scipion, 5, 146, 149–50; Mémoires des Gaules, 146, 149–50 Du Redouer, Mathurin, 84–85, 183; Sensuyt le nouveau monde et navigations faictes par Emeric Vespuce Florentin, 84–85 D’Urfé, Honoré, 5, 38, 40; L’Astrée, 38, 40 Du Vair, Guillaume, 63 Edict of Nantes (1598), 11, 57, 111, 236n73 education, 136–72; of Amerindians, 109–11; and Collège des Quatre Nations, 136–39, 170–71; exclusion of French authors and French language from curriculum, 139–41, 143–46; as first escape route from colonial bind, 136–72; and France’s imperialist colonizing agenda, 151–53; Greco-Roman history, literature, and culture, 136–37, 138–42; and Greco-Roman universalism, 138, 142–47; Jesuit schools and civilizing process, 137–42; Latin language education, 136–37, 138–40, 145, 261n19; method of “exemplarity,” 110–11; moderns’ challenges to, 142–47; and the vicious circle of boundaries, 109–11 education (first escape route from the colonial bind): moderns’ challenges to imitation and Greco-Roman universalism in French education, 142–47, 262n39 Elias, Norbert, 36, 127 Ellingson, Ter, 88, 89 Erasmus, De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio, 62 Estienne, Henri, 34–35, 236n12 expansion, politics of, 227; and the biblical story of Noah, 177–78; Catholic expansion and universalism, 113–14; and discourse of purity (poetics of contraction), 227; economic benefits, 81, 85, 112–13, 201–3; motivations for assimilation policy in New World, 112–14; and the relations de voyage, 79, 81–82,

inde x 83–85; and Roman ideal of universal empire, 113 Faret, Nicolas: and danger of regression into barbarism, 190–91; and greatness of French language, 169, 190–91; and GrecoRoman memory theft, 59–61, 193–94, 196; Projet de l’académie, pour servir de préface à ses statuts, 59–61, 152, 169, 190–91, 193–94, 196, 226 Ferguson, Margaret, 56 Ferry, Jules, 223 Fontenelle, M. de (Bernard Le Bovier): agricultural/evolutionary discourse, 214–16, 218; Dialogues des morts, 10, 32; Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, 32, 211–12, 214–15; on the Greeks as first sauvages, 212–17, 218; De l’origine des fables, 32, 212–14, 215–16; Nouveaux dialogues des morts, 10, 32, 215; on Racine’s language and characters, 227; reading of the relations de voyage, 213–14; rejecting natural firstness in favor of cultural secondarity, 211–17, 218; and the sauvage as lever to account for the differences between the French and Ancients, 211–17, 218; writings on the Quarrel, 10, 32, 211 Foucault, Michel, 8, 14, 37, 43, 140, 141 France’s dominant cultural narrative: challenging the narrative to account for the colonial politics of expansion, 20–25; colonization as civilizing mission, 128, 221–29; the colonizer/colonized axis, 15–16; “covering,” 37, 237n19; explaining the resistance to including colonization, 14–16, 221–29; fragmented awareness of the colonial past in tension with, 55, 66–67; France’s self-identification as incarnation of the Imperium Romanum, 18, 34, 113, 127–28; Gauls enshrined as ancestor of choice, 2–3; including the New World within the paradigm, 16–20, 235n63; and the memory war won by the ancients, 36–37, 50–52; new memory wars over French history and culture, 222–24, 240n69; and Third Republic, 223–24 François I, 139, 177, 200 Franks: Frankish-Trojan ancestry, 6, 37–38, 41; and vulgar Latin, 65 French Academy, 185–91, 225–28; definition of sauvage, 89, 209; the Quarrel and the

311

1687 showdown between Perrault and Boileau, 31–32, 125–27, 129; colonizing goals, 152, 225–27; founding as a defensive structure, 56, 59–61, 169; importance of la vraisemblance, 228; purification of the French language, 13–14, 226–27; Quarrel of the Cid, 185–91, 228; redefining the key Greek concept of “barbarian,” 69–70; Les sentiments de l’Académie Française sur le Cid, 186–7, 228. French Academy Dictionary (1694), 69, 89 French language: Bouhours’s defense of, 56, 64–66, 151–52, 170, 194–95; as defense against barbarism, 190–91; defenses of, 55–61, 64–66, 151–52, 168–70, 194–95; Du Bellay’s agricultural discourse and metaphor of “sauvage plant,” 204–5; exclusion from Jesuit schools, 136–37, 138–40, 143–46; and Greek language, 34–35, 68, 143, 236n 12; Le Laboureur’s struggle to reverse hierarchy of imitation, 192–93, 195–96; moderns’ challenging imitation and Greco-Roman universalism in French education, 142–44, 170; proposals to repair/purify, 13–14, 62–66, 226–27; seventeenth-century advances in the vernacular, 138–39, 260n8 Freud, Sigmund, 56 Frontenac, Comte Louis de Buade, 110, 248n31, 255n61, 256n76 Fumaroli, Marc, 33, 57 Furetière, Antoine: definitions of barbarian and sauvage, 68–70, 89, 189, 205–6, 250n60; Dictionnaire universel, 32, 68–70, 76, 78, 89, 188, 189, 205–6; and purification of the French language, 226; on the relations de voyage, 76, 78 Gallic Hercules, 57, 147–51, 227 Gallic Wars, 5 Gallic writing: the colonial bind of using Greco-Roman accounts to understand the Gauls, 9, 42; and Druid priests, 44, 239–40n56; and genre of the defense, 55–61; and Greco-Roman memory theft, 44–46, 58–61, 63; moderns’ explanations accounting for absence of, 8, 9, 40, 42–46, 58–61; moderns’ necessity of proving that the Gauls had world of letters, 39–40; moderns’ “new history” as counter-discourse, 42–46

312

index

Gambetta, Léon, 223 Gauls, precolonized: as ancestors championed by the moderns in the Quarrel, 6–9, 31–32, 36, 38–46, 232n22; as “barbarians,” 1–2, 9; explanations for the absence of written documents, 8, 9, 40, 42–46, 58–61; Greco-Roman historiographers’ portrayal, 1–2, 9, 42; and Greek theory of degeneration of nature, 39; moderns’ antiRoman battles, 6–10, 34, 38–46; moderns’ cultural, legal, political, and religious battles, 39; and moderns’ “new history,” 42–46; why a precolonized Gallic ancestry was desirable, 38–39 Gauls, Romanized/civilized, 31–32, 36–37, 46–52; championed by the ancients in the Quarrel, 31–32, 36–37, 46–52; as eager colonial subjects, 47–50; and Roman civilizing mission, 46–50; and Roman colonizing strategies and blurring of “us-them” boundaries, 50–52, 54; three problems with concept of “Romanization,” 50–52 Geertz, Clifford, 14–15 Genette, Gérard, 228 Gillot, Hubert, 33 Gliozzi, Giuliano, 88 Grafton, Anthony, 17, 235n63 Greco-Roman thought structures, 67–71; concept of the barbarian, 68–70; Greek view of nature as degenerative and hierarchical, 39, 67–68, 209–11; and hostility to imitation, 67 Greece, Ancient. See Ancient Greece Greek language. See Ancient Greek language Greenberg, Mitchell, 13 Greene, Thomas, 132 Greer, Allan, 14, 83, 87 Gueret, Gabriel, La guerre des auteurs anciens et moderns, 32 Guyot, Thomas, 146 Hall, Edith, 68 Harth, Erica, 188 Havard, Gilles, 14, 221; Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 16 Hegel, G. W. F., 15 Henri IV, 11, 57, 111, 114 Henry II, 200 Henry VII (England), 103 Hermann, Christian, 7

Hesiod, 67, 209–10 Hobbes, Thomas, 180–84, 273n45; De Cive, 182; De Corpore Politico, 182; Elements of Love, 188–89; Leviathan, 181, 182; model for the state of nature and dangers of regression into barbarism, 180–84, 188–89; negative portrayals of Amerindians, 182– 84; and the relations de voyage, 181–84 Hotman, François, 5, 7, 38, 40–41; FrancoGallia, 38, 41 Hugo, Victor, Préface de Cromwell, 33 humanism, 138, 201; and classical ideal, 174; crisis of, 8, 201; Gallic, 40; and GrecoRoman universalism, 8, 138; and late seventeenth-century French education, 138 humanitas, 47, 138, 241n72 Huppert, George, 42–43 Ignatius of Loyola, 80 imitation, functions of: as civilizing process, 46–50, 137–42; decolonization from the Ancients, 199–219; as defense against barbarism, 56–58, 61–67, 185–91; progress toward civilization, 56, 127, 129–30, 165, 167–72, 224; as voluntary subjection, 149–50, 164–65, 166–67 imitation as civilizing process: French Jesuit schools, 137–42; the Gallic Hercules and dangers of Rome’s civilizing mission, 57, 147–51, 227; Greco-Roman representations of the Gauls, 46–50; Latin language education, 136–37, 138–40, 145, 261n19; moderns’ challenges to Greco-Roman universalism and French education, 138, 142–47 imitation as voluntary subjection, 149–50, 154–65, 166–67; and the Amerindians’ implied consent, 162; art and, 162–65, 185–91; and assimilation policy toward Amerindians, 154–65; colonization as love story, 50–51, 155–56, 223–24; d’Abbeville on the Tupinambas subjection, 154; the Gallic Hercules and dangers of Rome’s civilizing mission, 57, 147–51, 227; and the relations de voyage, 154–65 imitation of the Ancients: and assumptions about Greco-Roman thought structures, 67–71; as civilizing process, 46–50, 136–72; and debates over French letters (the Quarrel), 31–34, 56, 67–72; and

inde x education, 136–72; and France’s cultural/ colonial story, 147–53; and the Gallic Hercules, 57, 147–51, 227; and genre of the defense, 56; and Greco-Roman universalism, 138, 142–47; the “us-them” dynamic and perils of, 51, 69–70, 71–72; and voluntary subjection, 149–50, 154–65, 166–67. See also classical path/ ideal (second escape route from the colonial bind); sauvage as lever to decolonize France from the Ancients (third escape route from the colonial bind) Imperium Romanum, 18, 34, 113, 127–28 Innocent VIII, Pope, 113–14 intermarriage and France’s assimilation policy toward Amerindians, 11–14, 101, 105–6, 111–12, 116–20; and demographic needs in the colonies, 111–12, 119; and illicit marriages in the native fashion, 119–20; Jesuits and, 105–6, 117–18; and risks of regression into barbarism, 116–18 Italy, 7–8, 42, 62, 238n38 Jacquin, Philippe, 14 Jaenen, Cornelius, 14, 104 Jaures, Jean, 223 Jesuit Order in the New World: the clash with the Crown over implementation of assimilation policy, 108–9, 255n64; and integrationist assimilation, 105–6, 108–9, 117–18; and intermarriage, 105–6, 117–18; and relations de voyage, 79–83; and segregation of the Amerindians and French, 106, 108–9, 117–18 Jesuit Relations, 76, 80, 81–83, 87, 248n31; and the Amerindians’ voluntary subjection and imitation, 155, 157, 160, 266n99; and educational method of “exemplarity,” 110; and integrationist assimilation, 105, 106; and intermarriage, 106, 259n116; terms “barbarian” and “sauvage,” 87 Jesuit schools in France, 137–42; acquiring humanitas through Greek and Latin languages, 138; the boarding school (internat system), 141; disdain for French literature and history, 140–41; and Greco-Roman universalism, 138, 142; Latin language education, 136–37, 138–40, 261n19; prohibitions on teaching and speaking French, 139–40; teaching

313

Roman history, literature, and culture, 136–37, 138–42 Jouvency, Joseph, 140 Justel, Henri, Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en Amérique qui n’ont point este encore publiez, 77, 81 La Boétie, Etienne de, 166–67; La Servitude volontaire, 166–67 Lalemant, Charles, 81 Lamberville, Father, 118 La Peltrie, Madeleine, 81 La Popelinière, Henri de, 42–43, 137 Latin language: Bouhours on vernacular French and, 64–66, 194–95; classical/ vulgar, 65–66; Du Bellay’s agricultural discourse and argument of French’s inferiority, 204–5; and humanitas, 138; Jesuit schools and, 136–37, 138–40, 261n19; moderns’ challenge to use of Latin over French, 64– 66, 142–45, 170; as sign of France’s past as a colonized people, 146 law, French tradition of, 7, 41 Lecoq, Anne-Marie, 33 Le Jeune, Paul: on Amerindians as nomads, 109–10, 176, 255–56n71; on Amerindians’ clothing/sartorial behavior, 164–65; on Amerindians’ education, 109– 10; on Amerindians’ imitation of the French, 157–65; on Amerindians’ skin color, 175–76; diminishing the differences of the Amerindians from the French, 101, 176; on interdependence of French colonists and Native Americans, 113; on intermarriage and assimilation, 105–6, 116; and motivations for France’s assimilation policy, 114–15; and politics of expansion, 81–82, 85; relations de voyage, 80, 81–83, 157–58; on risks of assimilation, 116; and three stage evolutionary development predicated on role of art, 162–65 Le Laboureur, Louis, 192–93, 195–96; Avantages de la langue française sur la langue latine, 192–93 Lemaire, Sandrine, 222 Le Mercier, François, 116–17 Le Roy, Louis, 183

314

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Lescarbot, Marc, 176, 181, 265n83; on the Amerindians’ voluntary subjection, 149, 154, 155; Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 75, 154, 178; and kinship between French and Amerindians, 178, 179–80; negative description of the Tupinambas, 183; on separation of New World and France, 75 L’Incarnation, Marie de, 81, 83, 109; La Vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de L’Incarnation, 83 Livy, 1–2, 42, 113 Longpierre, Hilaire Bernard de Requeleyne, baron de, Discours sur les anciens, 32 Loomba, Ania, 9 Louis XII, 232n22 Louis XIII, 57, 85, 91, 94, 139 Louis XIV, 14, 31; and France’s assimilation strategy in the New World, 11–12, 105, 107–9, 253n41; and France’s New World expansion, 82, 127–28, 136; imperialist agenda and creation of French public culture, 152–53; and Le Carrousel festival (1662), 127–29 Lucretius, 67–68 Mairet, Jean de, 189 Malherbe, François de, 92, 101 Marshall, Bill, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History, 16 Martin, Claude, 83 Martinique, 81 Mazarin, Cardinal, and the Collège des Quatre Nations, 136–37 Mbembe, Achille, 7 McDonald, Christie, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (ed.), 16 Médecis, Marie de, 91 Memmi, Albert, 66, 219, 225 memory wars: Algerian war and new memory wars over colonization in North Africa, 222–24; memory politics of presentday France and 2005 parliamentary legislation, 222–24, 240n69; over France’s Gallic heritage, 3, 10–11, 31–53, 54, 224–28. See also Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns Ménage, Gilles, Requête présentée par les dictionnaires, 171 Mercure François (newspaper), 107; excerpts of the relations de voyage, 77, 83; Razilly

on France’s colonial mission in Brazil, 154–55, 178–79 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, 7, 23–24, 57, 65, 146, 186–87 Mersenne, Marin, 181 Miller, Christopher, French Atlantic Triangle, 16 missionaries: Capuchin, 79, 91, 105; Dominican, 86, 105, 251n13; Jesuit, 79–83, 105–6, 108–9, 117–18; Recollect, 79–80, 107, 254n48; Sulpician, 79, 105; Ursuline, 81, 105, 164, 254n47, 259n 116 “moderns”: accounting for absence of Gallic written documents, 8, 9, 40, 42–46, 58–61; anti-Roman battles, 6–10, 34, 38–46, 225; challenges to imitation and Greco-Roman universalism in French education, 142–47, 262n39; on imitation as voluntary subjection, 166–67; legal and political theorists, 7, 40–42; memory wars over France’s Gallic heritage, 6–9, 31–32, 36, 38–46, 224–25, 232n22; “new history” as counter-discourse, 42–46, 137, 239n48; new interpretive strategy for reading Greco-Roman historiographers, 43–44; and the New World sauvage as a lever to decolonize France from the Ancients, 199–219; and question of where to situate the nation on the journey to civilization, 168–72. See also Gauls, precolonized; Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns monarchomaques, 40–41 Montaigne, Michel de, 138, 183 New World, France’s colonial relationship to, 3, 11–16. See also assimilation and France’s colonial stance toward Amerindians; relations de voyage; sauvage as lever to decolonize France from the Ancients (third escape route from the colonial bind) Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 52 Nicolet, Claude, 37 Noah, biblical story of, 177–78 noblesse d’épée, 200, 202, 210, 261n27 noblesse de robe, 88, 210 nomadism, 109–10, 164–65, 176, 255–56n71 Nora, Pierre, 222–23; Les lieux de mémoire, 222

inde x North Africa and the new memory wars over colonization, 222–24 Les nouvelles de l’Amérique (1678), 227 Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterêts (1539), 139 Paesi novamente retrovati (1507), 84–85 Pagden, Anthony, 17–18, 34, 68, 113 Pasquier, Etienne, 7, 41–43, 239n50; and Italian charges of French barbarism, 42, 64, 238n38; as proponent of the “new history,” 42–44, 137; Recherches de la France and defense of the French nation, 8–9, 41–42, 56; and Rome’s false universalism, 144–45 “passing” (as boundary-crossing), 97– 101, 115, 120 Patin, Guy, 181 Paul, Daniel, 87 Paul-Emile, De l’Antiquité des Gaules, 232n22 Pavel, Thomas, 187–88 Peabody, Susan, 252n21 Peace, Thomas, 249n51, 249n56 Peletier, Jacques, 145; Art poétique, 136, 145 Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul: Histoire de l’Académie Française, 152, 169, 186; on Le Cid’s first performance, 186 Perrault, Charles: Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 32; account of Louis XIV’s Le Carrousel festival, 128–131; the 1687 showdown with Boileau at French Academy, 31–32, 125–26, 168, 184, 191; rejection of imitation, 31–32, 262n39 Philip the Fair, 260n8 Phillips, Henry, 13 Plato, 44, 67, 210; Republic, 210 Pliny the Elder, 47 poetics of containment/contraction, 15, 226–27 Polybius, 67 Portugal and the New World, 103, 200, 203 postcolonial theory: adapted to pre-modern scholarship, 4–5; the concept/term “postcolonial,” 4; and early modern France, 5–10; “post” phase (decolonization and “neocolonization”), 9–10 Postel, Guillaume, 7, 38, 39, 177–78; De originibus, 39; Histoire mémorable, 38 progress/progression toward civilization: Amerindian sauvages, 165, 179, 191, 208; and the classical ideal, 174, 176, 200–201;

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concept of historical progress, 26, 135, 174, 200, 208, 218; and decolonization from the Ancient World, 218; and evolutionary discourse, 176, 204–8, 215; and France’s dominant cultural narrative, 24, 174; as function of imitation, 56, 127, 129–30, 165, 167–72, 224; idea of historical progress, 26, 135, 174, 200, 208, 218; and the moderns’ “new history,” 239n48 Protestant-Catholic controversies, 7, 57–58 Protestant Reformation, 78 purity: assimilation and intermarriage policy as contrary to, 13–14; dominant cultural discourse of purity as a poetics of contraction, 226–27; France’s assimilation policy and task of safeguarding culture, 159–60 Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, 3, 10–11, 31–53, 54–72; the ancients and the Romanized Gauls, 31–32, 36–37, 46–52; the ancients winning of the memory war, 36–37, 50–53, 54; antiRoman battles, 6–10, 34, 38–46; duration and dating, 32–34; expanded frame to include both colonial stories, 125–35; genre of the defense, 55–67; GrecoRoman representation of Gauls and civilizing process, 46–50; imitation of the Ancients, 31–34, 56, 67–72; and the infinite progression toward civilization, 167–72; legacy and the colonial fracture, 221–29, 240n69; memory wars over France’s Gallic heritage, 3, 10–11, 31–53, 54, 224–28; moderns and precolonized Gauls as ancestors, 6–9, 31–32, 36, 38–46, 232n22; moderns’ claims of Greco-Roman memory theft, 44–46, 58–61; moderns’ explanations for absence of Gallic written documents, 8, 9, 40, 42–46, 58–61; the moderns’ “new history,” 42–46, 137, 239n48; purity and the poetics of contraction, 226–27; puzzle of, 31–35; question of the point at which French history began, 36; science and philosophy, 35; the 1687 showdown between Perrault and Boileau, 31–32, 125–27, 129; the two Gauls, 31–38; “usthem” dynamics and perils of imitation, 51, 69–70, 71–72; and validity of Roman

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index

Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, (cont’d) legal system, 7, 40–42. See also defense, genre of the; French Academy; imitation of the Ancients Racine, 140–41, 227 Ramus, Petrus (Pierre de la Ramée), 40; Gramaire, 40 Rankin, H. D., 48, 52 Ranum, Orest, Artisans of Glory, 22 Ravadière, Lieutenant General, 91 Razilly, François de: and familial ties between the French and Tupis, 178–79; and France’s colonial mission in Brazil (and the Tupis), 91, 92, 101, 154–55, 178–79; and Tupinamba tribal members in France, 91, 92, 101; on the Tupis’ voluntary subjection, 154–55 reducciones (Native American reservations), 106 Régis, St. Jean-François, 80–81 relations de voyage, 11–14, 22, 75–90, 91–121, 174–84; accounts of intermarriage, 11–14, 101, 105–6, 118–21; agricultural/ evolutionary metaphors and discourse, 208–9; the Amerindians’ imitation and voluntary subjection, 154–65; and assimilation policy toward Amerindians, 11–14, 89–90, 91–121, 154–65, 179, 180–84; and the Catholic Reformation, 78–83, 154–55; contrasted to British and Spanish travel accounts, 76; d’Abbeville’s Histoire, 80, 91–102, 154; and economic benefits of expansion, 79, 81–82, 83–85; education of Amerindians and the vicious circle of boundaries, 109–11; excerpts in newspapers and anthologies, 77, 83, 84– 85; influences on other forms of French writing, 76–78, 83; narrative style, 76, 82; negative portrayals of Amerindians, 182–84, 272n36; and political expansion, 81–82; popular success, 75–78, 82; publishing, 80; readers, 80–82, 85; reverse influence and dangers of regression into barbarism, 115–18, 133–34, 180–84; and sauvages as “us,” 174–80, 185; terms of barbarian and sauvage, 87–89, 208–9, 249n51, 249n56, 250n60; and travel narratives, 83–84, 177 Richelieu, Cardinal: and the Company of

New France, 107, 254n55; educational method of “exemplarity,” 110; and the French Academy, 13, 185–86; and legal status enabling Amerindians to become French naturals, 107; and the Quarrel of the Cid at the French Academy, 185–86 Rollin, Charles, 50–52, 145, 153 Roman Catholic Church, 7, 236n73; education of Amerindians and the vicious circle of boundaries, 109–11; religious orders and integrationist assimilation in New World, 105–6, 108–9, 254n47; worldwide expansion and universalism, 113–14. See also Catholic Reformation “Romanization,” 50–52, 235n67 Romanowski, Sylvie, Through Strangers’ Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France, 78 Rome, See Ancient Rome Ronsard, 34–35, 38; Franciade, 38 Rouen Royal Entry Festival (1550), 199–200, 201–3 Rouille, Guillaume le, 7, 39; Recueil de l’antique préexcellence de Gaule et des Gaulois, 39 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 167, 188; Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, 167; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 167, 188 Rule, John, 13 sauvage: and agricultural/evolutionary discourse, 203–9, 215, 218–19; Fontenelle’s rejection of natural firstness for a cultural secondarity, 211–17, 218; Furetière’s definitions, 89, 189, 205–6, 250n60; Greco-Roman mythical construct, 87–88, 250n58; Judeo-Christian constructs, 88, 250n58; language of the relations de voyage, 87–89, 208–9, 249n51, 249n56, 250n60; shift from barbarian to, 204–6, 208–9; as the universal other, 88–89 sauvage as lever to decolonize France from the Ancients (third escape route from the colonial bind), 199–219; agricultural/evolutionary discourse and the metaphor of the sauvage, 203–9, 215, 218–19; Amerindians as lens through which to view the Ancients, 212–13, 218; and differences between

inde x the French and Ancients, 211–17, 218; Du Bellay’s agricultural discourse, 204–8, 215; Fontenelle and the Greeks as first sauvages, 212–17, 218; and GrecoRoman metal metaphor and concept of degeneration, 209–12; new evolutionary model of for Greco-Roman civilization, 207–8, 215; the problem of differences, 203–9, 211–18; rejecting natural firstness in favor of cultural secondarity, 216, 218 “sauvage plant” metaphor, 204–5 Savaron, Jean, 57–58, 150–51; Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement des rois et de l’Etat, 57–58, 150–51 Sayre, Gordon, 76, 87 Scudéry, Georges de, 185, 187, 189–90 Seed, Patricia, 162 similarity, crisis of, 26, 174–80, 185, 191. See also difference/similarity slavery, 86, 97, 252n21 Sorel, Charles, Histoire comique de Francion, 140 Spain and the New World: assimilation policies, 103; Columbus, 83–84, 177, 182; evangelization, 249n47; references to colonial enterprises in Spanish literature, 17; travel accounts focused on technical issues and resources, 76; Treaty of Tordesillas, 203 Speroni, Sperone, Dialogo delle lingue, 145 Spurr, David, 156 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 40 St. Evremond, Charles de, La comédie des académistes pour la réformation de la langue Française, 171 Strabo, 1, 42, 47–49, 231n4 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (ed.), 16 Tacitus, 52, 149 Thevet, André, Singularitez de la France Antartique, 182–83, 272n36 Third Republic (1870–1945) and narrative of colonization as a civilizing mission, 223–24 Thoreau, Henry David, 76 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 14 Tissard, François, 62 Tory, Geofroy: Champ Fleury, 44–45, 58, 148–49; and the Gallic Hercules, 148–49; and Greco-Roman theft of the Gauls’

317

writing, 44–45, 58; on Roman “soft” mode of domination, 47, 149 translatio imperii and translatio studii, 21, 40, 192 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), 203 Trojan myth of descent from Rome, 6, 37–38, 70, 232n18, 232n22 Troy, sack of, 6 Trudeau, Danielle, 56 Tupinambas (Tupis) of Brazil: Boileau’s comparison of Perrault and the moderns to, 125–27, 129; d’Abbeville on voluntary subjection of, 154; d’Abbeville’s Histoire de la mission des pères capucins, 80, 91–102, 154; familial ties between the French and, 178–79; as France’s allies in mock sea battle against the Portuguese, 200; the Rouen royal entry festival and French replicas of, 199–200; transformation and assimilation, 80, 94–102 universalism: Catholic, 113–14; challenges to Greco-Roman, 8, 10–11, 138, 142–47, 153; and Fontenelle’s agricultural/ evolutionary discourse, 216–17; French, 78, 151–52, 153 universal other, 88–89 University of Paris, 62, 139–40, 141, 144 “us-them” boundaries: blood ties and familial bonds of French and Amerindians, 176–80; and classical ideal (second escape route from the colonial bind), 173–98, 200–201; France’s assimilationist stance toward Amerindians, 26, 92–94, 102–11, 116–21, 156, 159–61, 174–80, 184, 185, 191; France’s identification with Rome and Imperium Romanum, 127–28; French culture’s task of safeguarding the community’s identity and purity, 159–61; and Greek idea of outsiders, 69–70; Hobbes’s model for state of nature and dangers of fluid boundaries, 180–84, 188–89; integrationist assimilation policy, 104–9, 119–21; Louis XIV’s Le Carrousel festival, 127–29; ontological similarities between French and Amerindians, 175–76; “passing” and boundary-crossing, 97–101, 115, 120; perils of imitation of the Ancients, 51, 69–70, 71–72; relations de voyage and the “crisis of similarity,” 26, 174–80, 185, 191

318

index

Vairasse, Denis, Histoire des Sévarambes, 77 Valéry, Paul, 190 Valla, Lorenzo, Elegantiae, 10 Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, 70 Versailles, 152–53 Vespucci, Amerigo, 84, 182, 267n 104 Vidal, Cécile, 14, 16, 221; Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 16 Voltaire, 217; Candide, 203, 207; Le mondain, 217 la vraisemblance, principle of, 60, 165, 228–29; and invraisemblable (not true-seeming), 14, 15, 23, 228

Waswo, Richard, 70, 145, 232n18 Weber, Eugen, 19; From Peasants into Frenchmen, 19 White, Hayden, 250n58 White, Richard, 14; The Middle Ground, 16 Wine, Kathleen, 40 Wintroub, Aaron Michael, 200, 202 Woolf, Greg, 46, 50, 235n67, 241n72 Xavier, Francis, 80, 160

acknowledgments

This book’s goal is nicely illuminated by a story a friend told me. When he and his brother were young boys, their parents staged a photograph shoot for their annual Christmas card. Dressed as a Chicago White Sox player, he shook hands with his brother dressed as a Chicago Cub. The caption read “Peace on Earth.” He recalled, however, that after hearing the camera click, his brother spit in his face. Although this less peaceful moment did not have the lofty official status that picture frames give, it still figured importantly in his family history. Like this story, my book widens the frame of France’s official literary and cultural history to capture what has remained outside its lens. The stories omitted from the frame reshape our understanding of what is in it. My colleague and friend Eric Gans has been the most important person to encourage my journey outside the frame. My project began as an intuitive flash of insight that was hard to substantiate at first. Immediately grasping my interpretive leap, Eric spent hours brainstorming with me. He supported me at every stage of the process, demonstrating an intellectual generosity sans pareil. Not only did he read the entire book manuscript—he did so in its multiple versions. To both him and his wife, Stacey Meeker, I am grateful for intellectual and emotional support. UCLA has an amazingly powerful intellectual community. I feel blessed to be supported by so many wonderful colleagues and friends. First and foremost is Françoise Lionnet, who not only read multiple chapter drafts but also gave me a steady stream of insightful ideas, bibliographical references, and great meals. As a historian, Lynn Hunt provided particularly helpful feedback on the intersection of our disciplines. I also wish to thank Olivia Bloechl, Sandra Harding, Susan McClary, Kirstie McClure, Anne Mellor, Gary Nash, Barbara Lee Packer, David Sabean, and Malina Stefanovska, all of whom offered thoughtful commentary on my chapters. More broadly, my colleagues Jean-Claude Carron, Patrick Coleman, Rachel Fretz, Sarah Morris, Ronald

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ac k now l edg m e nts

Mellor, Laure Murat, Felicity Nussbaum, Dominic Thomas, and Zrinka Stahuliak gave me great bibliographical, moral, intellectual support. Beyond UCLA, many colleagues provided invaluable comments on my chapters: Margaret Ferguson, Mitchell Greenberg, Timothy Hampton, Lawrence Kritzman, Michèle Longino, John D. Lyons, Claudia Moatti, Michael Randall, James Reid, Sylvie Romanowski, Domna Stanton, Harriet Stone, Leslie Tuttle, Kathleen Wine, and Abby Zanger. Leslie Rabine and I go way back; years ago we edited a book together. She turned her expert editing skills on my book, helping me to uncover ideas I didn’t know I knew. My brother, Arthur Melzer, and I go back even further! His lucidity as a thinker helped me to work through key problems. To my surprise, several nonacademic friends eagerly read my chapters, encouraging me to make my work clearer to readers outside the ivory tower. I thank Paul Herstein, Lucia Sommers, and Mary Wolf-Roberts. I also thank several UCLA graduate students who provided me with research assistance: Zara Bennett, Katelyn Knox, Catherine Mullen, Marcie Ray, Elizabeth Vitanza, and Duncan Yoon. I am indebted to Peter Reill and his wonderful stewardship of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. The kernel of this book’s project emerged from a conference there. Moreover, the center provided me with generous research assistance. I am also grateful to the American Council on Learned Societies and the UCLA Academic Senate for funding my research. Last, but not least, I thank my intrepid editor, Jerry Singerman, who really helped make this a better book. At the press, Caroline Winschel and Noreen O’Connor-Abel have been wonderfully patient and supportive.